"It was them the whole time," I say, slower. "Nine years down there, and it was the same men who came for my address. And the one from the night you got out?—"
"Roy Hoyt."
"Roy Hoyt." I've never heard the name, and I'll never lose it now. It's already in me somewhere permanent, filed next to the sound of my mother's car going into the ditch. "You're sure?"
"Imani's sure. It's in Ollie's deposition." Her voice goes flat and exact, the way it does when she's holding herself together with both hands. "He knew who I was, Finn. He stood in my mother's kitchen, and months later he had me on his own people's ranch, and he knew, and he did what he did because he knew. None of it was ever random."
And there it is.
Ten years I've carried a weight I thought was mine.
That I ran and it didn't work and her parents died for my address.
And I'd started to set it down.
She let me start to, in the sunroom, when she told me it wasn't Ironwood who took her, that the two halves of her life were separate, that the worst of it had nothing to do with me.
Now she's in a garage telling me she was wrong.
It picks the weight back up and hangs it on me again, heavier, because it's not only her parents now.
It's her. Every day of those nine years.
The same organization, the thread running straight from a boy in a federal building to a woman on a table in a bunker, and I'm the reason the thread exists at all, I'm the first knot in it?—
"Stop," she says.
"I didn't say anything."
"You didn't have to. I can see it climbing up your back."
She steps in close and puts her hand flat on my chest. The warmth of it comes through my shirt and my breathing goes to hell.
"I didn't come here to hang it back on you. I came because I couldn't hold it alone, and you're the only person I want holding the other end."
"Feels the same from where I'm standing."
"I know it does." Her hand presses harder, like she can push it back down into me by force. "You want to carry something, carry this with me. Not the guilt. The rest of it. That it was them, they're still standing, and there are still more women in a hole that belongs to the man behind every bit of it, and we're going to go get them."
I get my hand over hers on my chest and hold it there.
I don't say what I'm thinking, which is that I’ve spent ten years believing the best I could do for this woman was stay a thousand miles from her.
She just walked across a clubhouse to tell me the best I can do is stand next to her while she carries something.
Nobody's ever asked me to carry the other end of anything. My whole life has been people handing me things to hold alone.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay."
She takes her hand back. There's a grease print on her shirt where she pressed against me and neither of us says anything about it.
***
Ollie's file confirms it that afternoon.
Imani's got the deposition and a page off the Arizona Department of Corrections, and she doesn't make me come to her.
