“Riley’s asleep. I’m up.”
“Good.” A pause. “I needed to hear your voice.”
My jaw tightens. Nash doesn’t do sentiment unless it matters.
“What do you have?” I ask.
“Enough to make me sick,” he says. “And enough to make me sure.”
I lean against the kitchen counter, eyes on the dark window. “You said Dad might be alive.”
“He is.”
The words hit like a fist to the ribs.
I go still. “Don’t do that. Don’t say it like that unless you can prove it.”
“I can,” Nash says, and the steadiness in his tone is worse than panic would be. “We pulled a transmission. Encrypted. Old frequency. Not something that should’ve been active in years. Maddox has someone who knows how to find ghosts. They found one.”
My throat works. “A transmission from Dad?”
“Not a full voice file,” Nash says. “But a coded burst. A call-and-response pattern. Something only one person we know used to sign off with. It’s him, Crewe.”
I close my eyes for a second.
Seventeen years old again, standing on a porch in Valor Springs, listening to Mom cry in the kitchen while Nash stares out at the dark like he can see the truth hiding in it.
“They never found a body,” I say, more to myself than him.
“No,” Nash replies. “Because there wasn’t one.”
My chest tightens, sharp and painful. “Where is he?”
“We don’t know yet,” Nash says. “But we know he’s alive, and we know he’s in trouble.”
I grip the phone harder. “What kind of trouble?”
“The kind that makes a man disappear for years,” Nash says. “The kind that makes him go silent. The kind that makes people lie about a death.”
I stare at the floor like it might keep me upright.
A wild goose chase. That’s what this sounds like. A trap. A rumor. A hope that will wreck us all over again.
But Nash doesn’t chase rumors.
He chases truth like it’s oxygen.
“Why are you telling me now?” I ask.
“Because I need you,” he says simply. “And because you’re almost out.”
My jaw flexes. “My contract’s close to done.”
“I know,” Nash says. “You can take an honorable discharge if you want it. You can come on board.”
I swallow. “And if I do, I’m walking away from Ridgeway. From everything.”
From Riley.
