True North

Chapter 4

Genevieve found Renee in her office before eight the next morning, already on her second coffee, and didn’t bother sitting down before she said it. “I want a formal apology from Nolan. Written, notarized if it has to be. If he won’t give me one, we file for a restraining order before the Sterling announcement goes out. I’m not walking into that press conference with this hanging over the family.” She hadn’t slept, not really, the hospital’s fluorescent lighting still stinging behind her eyes, and she’d decided somewhere around four in the morning that the fastest way through this was control, since nothing else about the last two days had offered her any.

Renee didn’t look up from her screen. “You want me to draft the language?”

“Draft both. The apology and the filing. Let’s see which one he decides to be smart about.”

She called Nolan herself that afternoon, standing at her office window with the phone pressed hard enough to her ear that it would leave a mark. He picked up on the second ring.

“Genevieve.”

“You need to apologize to Desmond. Formally. In writing.”

“Listen to me for one second.” His voice was steady in a way that made her want to throw something. “Your mother and brother jumped me outside a bar last night. They searched my pockets for money that doesn’t exist, and when they didn’t find any, Desmond took the one thing I had left of my father’s and put his boot through it. That’s what happened, Genevieve. Whatever they told you happened before that isn’t true.”

“That’s not what I called to discuss.”

“You asked why I hit him. I’m telling you why.”

“I asked you to apologize.” Her voice climbed before she could stop it. “I don’t know who you are right now, Nolan. Six years and I never once saw you raise a hand to anyone, and now you’re brawling in parking lots and running off with strangers, and something about this divorce has clearly curdled in you, because I don’t recognize the man on the other end of this call.”

There was a long pause, long enough that she almost thought the line had dropped.

“Maybe you never looked hard enough to recognize him in the first place,” Nolan said finally, quiet now instead of steady. “You’ve decided your family can’t be wrong about anything, Genevieve. You’re choosing to be blind to what they actually are, even when one of them is standing in front of you having just crushed the only thing I had left of my father. Ask yourself why that was easier to believe than me.”

The line went dead before she could answer.

She stood there with the phone against her ear for longer than she wanted to admit, the dial tone humming in place of whatever he might have said next, and when Renee knocked to remind her about the Sterling call in ten minutes, Genevieve set the phone down and told herself she felt nothing at all, which was, she knew even as she thought it, a lie efficient enough to get her through the rest of the day.

She buried the call the way she buried most things now, under work. By noon she had a folder open on Julian Sterling’s shipping conglomerate, projected route overlaps mapped against Calloway Maritime’s Atlantic corridor, numbers that made the merger look less like a business deal and more like a lifeline she badly needed to reach. Her mother had already started calling it something else in private. A partnership like this is really a marriage anyway, Eleanor had said over the phone that morning, like Desmond’s collarbone wasn’t still wrapped from the night before, and Genevieve had let the comment sit rather than argue with it, because arguing required an energy she didn’t currently have.

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The cannery smelled like salt and rust even with the ocean two miles off, decades of fish oil worked so deep into the concrete that no amount of scrubbing had ever gotten it out. Somewhere above them a gull had gotten into the rafters and wouldn’t stop complaining about it. Jo led Nolan past silent conveyor lines and a gutting table someone had converted into a workbench, back to a room with better lighting than the rest of the building and two men already waiting inside, the same two who’d flanked her outside the bar.

“Sit,” Jo said, nodding at a metal folding chair, and when Nolan didn’t move fast enough she added, “this’ll go faster if you trust me for the next ten minutes.”

He sat.

“That scar isn’t from any accident,” she said, no preamble. “It’s old, and it’s deliberate. Someone put it there on purpose, a long time before your father died, and the year he actually died is full of holes that shouldn’t be there. Medical records missing. A police report that contradicts itself twice on the same page. People don’t usually get that sloppy by accident.”

“Then who was sloppy on purpose?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. And I think you’re going to help me, whether you understand why yet or not.”

She threw the blade without warning, no windup, no word of warning, straight at his face.

Nolan’s hand closed around the handle an inch from his own eye before a single thought had time to form, the motion so clean it looked rehearsed, though he’d never held a knife like this in his life. Behind Jo, both men went very still.

“Good,” Jo said, like she’d expected exactly that and nothing less. “Now the safe.”

She nodded at an old floor safe bolted into the corner, black steel gone dull with age, a dial worn smooth from decades of hands that weren’t his. Nolan crouched in front of it without knowing why he crouched, without knowing what he was even looking for, and somewhere behind his eyes his father’s voice surfaced out of nowhere, low and unhurried, reciting four numbers in an order that meant nothing and everything at once.

His hand turned the dial before his mind caught up to what it was doing.

The safe clicked open.

Nobody in the room said anything for a moment. Jo crossed to crouch beside him, staring into the open safe like the contents mattered less than the fact he’d opened it at all, and when she finally looked at him again, something in her expression had shifted, gone quiet and careful, a woman doing math she hadn’t expected to need tonight.

“Who taught you that,” she said. It wasn’t really a question.

“Nobody,” Nolan said, and meant it, and that seemed to unsettle her more than any answer could have.

He turned his own hand over like it belonged to a stranger, calluses and old scars all familiar and none of the knowledge behind them familiar at all, and for the first time since the tower, since the compass, since any of it, Nolan Cross had absolutely no idea who he actually was.