Noah nodded. He let a beat of silence sit before changing direction.
"When we spoke last time, you said that when you passed the crash scene on Route 73 there was a police cruiser there."
"An SUV. Not a cruiser."
"That's right. I remember us having an exchange about that." He paused. "Here's the thing. The officer who was first on scene was driving a cruiser."
"I know what they said. But it was an SUV I saw. I've never wavered on that."
Noah nodded. "Were you aware at the time that the High Peaks police chief had been reported driving around town drinking?"
"Who didn't know about that?"
"He wasn't on duty that night."
"So another officer used the SUV."
Noah grimaced. "Yeah, but that's not what's in the official report."
"Seems obvious why," Lydia said. "Because if it was, people would be asking questions about the chief. I expect he made sure that was brushed under the rug."
"Right." Noah shifted in his chair. "The report has you born in the month of March. Is that right?"
"Why do you ask?"
“Oh, just that there were some discrepancies with the timeline and I wanted to make sure there weren't any others."
"Yeah. March 5th. I'm feeling it now." She smiled. The same warm, open expression she'd worn the first time.
Noah reached for his notepad to jot down the date. As he looked down at the pad, his eyes moved past it to the space just below Lydia's collar.
She was wearing a necklace. It had a thin silver chain. A pendant shaped like half a comma with a colored stone set into the center. Light green.
He kept writing. His pen moved across the notepad in shapes that weren't words. His pulse climbed but his hand stayed steady because that was the training, the instinct, the part of the job that took over when the thinking part of the brain went white.
March. March was aquamarine. Pale blue. He knew this because Ethan had sat in the cab of the Bronco two weeks ago and explained it to him. Twelve birthstones. One for each month. Garnet for January. Aquamarine for March. Peridot for August.
The stone around Lydia's neck was not aquamarine. It was not pale blue. It was light green. Peridot. August.
Fiona Spence was born in August.
Noah looked up from his notepad. "Beautiful necklace you have there."
Lydia paused. Her coffee cup stopped halfway to her mouth. Then she completed the motion and took a sip. "Oh, this? A gift from my late husband." She touched the pendant with her free hand. The gesture was casual. Almost.
"That's a birthstone, right?"
"Yeah."
"I'm pretty sure light green is August."
"Huh,” she replied. "My husband was never good at details.”
Noah looked at her. And she looked at him. And something passed between them in that kitchen, in the space between the radio playing softly and the window framing the barn,something that both of them recognized at the same time. The moment when a conversation stopped being a conversation and became something else.
“More coffee?”
Lydia set her cup down. Her hand moved to the counter behind her, a motion so natural that it could have been someone steadying themselves or reaching for the sugar bowl or doing any of the hundred things a person does in their own kitchen without thinking. Noah saw it and didn't see it. His eyes were on the necklace and the green stone that belonged to a missing girl and the woman wearing it who was born in March, not August.
