"Say the name," Elara said.
She was gripping the phone so hard her knuckles had gone pale. She was still in her car, still parked outside the clinic, the engine off and the afternoon light fading fast around her.
"I need to be sure before I say it out loud," Callum said. His voice was controlled but only just — she could hear what was underneath it, the particular tension of a man standing at the edge of something he cannot come back from. "I've been running it through every angle since it surfaced this morning. Every reason it could be wrong. Every reason I could be misremembering."
"And?" she pressed.
"And I keep coming back to the same face." A pause. "Elara. The night of the accident, when the car came at us — I pushed you back and I turned to take the impact and in the half-second before I hit the hood, I looked through the windscreen." He stopped. "I saw the driver clearly. He wasn't wearing a mask. He wasn't hiding. I think he believed I wouldn't survive to remember."
"Callum." Her voice was very quiet. "The name."
A long silence.
"Richard Voss," he said.
The world stopped.
"Say that again," she whispered.
"Richard Voss." His voice was careful and certain and terrible. "Elara — he's your brother."
She sat in the car and felt the bottom drop out of everything.
Richard. Her older brother by four years. The one who had walked her down the aisle at her wedding because their father was gone. The one who had sat across from her at Sunday dinners and asked about the company and hugged her when the divorce was finalized and told her she was better off, she'd always been better off without Callum, that man never deserved you, Elara.
Richard, who had hated Callum from the beginning. Who had called the marriage a mistake the week it was announced. Who had never, not once, said a single kind word about the man his sister loved.
"You're sure," she said. Not a question. A requirement.
"I'm sure," Callum said quietly.
She pressed her hand over her mouth.
She breathed in and out four times.
"Don't do anything yet," she said. "Don't call anyone. Don't go anywhere. Give me an hour."
"Elara—"
"One hour, Callum." Her voice cracked on his name — just slightly, just once. "Please."
She hung up.
She sat in her car in the dark for a long time.
She thought about Richard at her wedding. His hand on hers as they walked up the aisle. The way he'd leaned down and whispered, you look beautiful. The way she'd believed, completely, that whatever else was uncertain in her life, her brother was solid ground.
She thought about the lavender. Three weekends of planting. Callum on the deck. The car that came from nowhere.
She thought about eleven weeks and a quiet loss in Mara's apartment.
She thought about Richard calling her the week after the divorce, his voice warm with brotherly concern: He's gone, El. Time to start fresh. Come stay with me this weekend. Let me take care of you.
She pressed her palm flat against the steering wheel.
Then she started the car.
She drove to Richard's house.
She didn't call ahead.
She knocked.
He answered in thirty seconds, in his evening clothes, with a glass of whisky in his hand and the easy smile of a man who had no idea the ground had just shifted beneath him.
"Elara." His face opened with genuine pleasure. "This is a surprise. Come in—"
"Did you know Victoria Ashford before the accident?" she asked.
The smile stayed. But something behind his eyes moved. Fast. Quickly managed. She'd been watching faces for two years. She didn't miss it.
"Victoria?" he said. "Callum's—"
"Before. Did you know her before."
A beat too long.
"We'd met at a few events," he said. "Why?"
She looked at him — her brother, her family, the man who had held her hand down an aisle — and felt something close in her chest with a sound like a door.
"Where were you," she said very quietly, "on the night of the fourteenth of October, two years ago?"
Richard Voss looked at his sister.
And for the first
time in her life, he couldn't hold her gaze.