"Good." He left me in the front room while he went out and grabbed the glass, then moved to the broken window and pulled off the tarp I'd taped up last night. Then he studied the frame for a moment before opening his toolkit and getting to work.
I should have gone back to the boxes. Should have kept sorting papers and doing something useful. Instead, I leaned against the wall and watched him.
He handled the tools like he'd done this a hundred times before with a quiet competence that seemed stitched into every movement. He'd always been solid, even back in high school when I barely allowed myself to look at him.
He was older then. Two grades ahead of me and from the wrong side of town, according to people who cared about that sort of thing.
But he'd never looked at me the way other people did. Never treated me like a Hollister problem waiting to happen.
He'd just been... steady.
"You're good at this," I said, more to fill the silence than anything else.
He glanced over his shoulder. "What, fixing windows?"
"Fixing things in general."
He turned back to the frame and fit the new glass into place. "Not everything can be fixed."
Something in his tone said he wasn't talking about windows.
I leaned against the doorframe. "What do you mean?"
He didn't answer right away. Just secured the corners of the glass and tested the edges with his thumb. Finally, he said, "Things people don't want fixed."
"Like what?"
He straightened and wiped his hands on his jeans. "Old arguments. Long memories. Lines drawn so deep people forget why they're there in the first place."
I thought about the missing envelope. About Ruby's questions at the Merc. About the way Mrs. Davis had looked at Torin like she wanted to warn him away from something.
"You think I'm going cause trouble for the rodeo." It wasn't a question.
Torin met my gaze. "I think everyone is expecting you to."
"And you?"
He held my eyes for a long moment. "I think you came back for a reason, and I don't think it was just to sign papers."
My pulse kicked up again, harder this time. "My aunt passed away. I'm here because somebody needed to handle things."
"I know." His voice grew softer. "But it seems like you're already digging in."
He wasn't wrong. I wiped the dust off my hands and glanced back toward the table, toward the gap in the files that still bothered me more than it should. If I wanted to figure out what Aunt Lois's notes meant, I was going to have to ask for help. And Torin was in a position to provide it.
"I think there's something missing in one of the files," I said, then waited to gauge his reaction to decide how much I could trust him.
He paused, his fingers still pressed against the edge of the glass. "Missing how?"
I kept my voice casual. "In the files. There's a divider that Aunt Lois labeled, but the envelope behind it is gone."
He turned toward me then, his shoulders pulling back as his attention locked on my face. The look he gave me said he was still working through what that might mean.
"Who else has been in the house?"
"No one." I crossed my arms. "Just me."
I didn't want to leap to conclusions or turn this into something dramatic when it could just be a simple mistake. But Aunt Lois didn't make mistakes. Not with family records. Over the years she'd become the family historian and enjoyed researching the history of the Hollisters all the way back to before they immigrated from England.
