Chapter 6
Sera
I woke up in a bed that wasn’t mine, in a house I’d broken into, and my first thought was: Travis Hale saw me in my underwear.
Not a glimpse. Not a quick, accidental moment in a hallway. I had been floating on my back in his pool, eyes closed, in my bra and underwear, when a man I hadn’t seen in three years walked in and found me there.
I pressed my face into the pillow and stayed there for a count of ten. I turned my head sideways and stared at the wall, and the full scope of what I’d done arranged itself in daylight with the kind of clarity that made me want to crawl under the bed and live there for all eternity.
I had driven to Montana. I had guessed the code to a former CIA operative’s security gate using the pet name he called my dead sister. I had let myself into his house, wandered through his hallways, found his underground swimming pool, stripped down to my bra and underwear, and gone for a swim.
And then the man had come home and found me there, and instead of shooting me or calling the police, he’d made me chamomile tea and given me a guest room.
I wondered how long it was possible for me to live under the bed. A couple of years? Maybe longer? Long enough that Travis forgot I existed and I didn’t have to face him?
I thumped my head back against the pillow. This was not who Sera Bolland was.
Sera Bolland was the woman who arrived fifteen minutes early and organized her bookshelf by subject because alphabetical by author was offensive. Sera Bolland labeled her refrigerator shelves and kept a tape tell on her closet door and pushed her desk chair in to the same precise angle every morning.
Sera Bolland did not drive across state lines in the middle of the night and break into someone’s home because she was scared and couldn’t think of a better option.
Except I had. Lying here replaying it wasn’t going to undo any of it. And sadly, life under the bed wasn’t an option.
I sat up slowly. The guest room looked worse in the daylight than it had at three in the morning. Not dirty. Sterile. The comforter was plain gray. The nightstand had a single drawer and nothing on top. The blinds were drawn, but thin bars of morning light striped across the carpet, which was clean and unmarked, the kind of carpet that had never felt bare feet before mine.
A guest room that had never had a guest. In a house that felt more like a vault than a home. And I’d driven hours in the middle of the night to get here, which meant I needed to stop lying to myself about why.
The truth was, I’d known when I got in the car in Spokane that the case wasn’t the only reason I was driving to Montana.
I’d told myself it was. For hours, through the dark and the highway and the mountains, I’d recited the justification like a briefing: someone broke into my apartment, the FBI wouldn’t act on my data, Travis had the technical capability to help, this was a professional decision based on operational necessity.
All of that was true. But none of it was the whole truth.
I’d wanted to see him.
There it was. The thing I’d been walking around for years—honestly, even before Naomi died. The way you walk around a piece of furniture you keep bumping into in the dark. I could navigate the room. I could avoid stubbing my toe. But the furniture was still there, and eventually you had to admit you knew exactly where it was and you kept bumping into it because some part of you wanted to.
I’d wanted to see Travis. And I’d used the break-in and the case and the professional justification to give myself permission to drive to his door.
And now I was here, and I’d seen him, and the permission had expired, and what was underneath it was the same thing that had been underneath it for four years.
He was Naomi’s. He had been Naomi’s. The distinction between those two tenses was supposed to mean something, and it did.
It meant my sister was dead, and the fact that her death had rearranged the world in a way that put Travis within theoretical reach made me exactly the kind of person I’d spent three years trying not to be.
The code to his gate and his door was the nickname he used to call her. He’d built a fortress and sealed it with her name. That wasn’t a man who’d moved on. That was a man who’d turned his grief into architecture and locked himself inside it.
I pulled the covers back and put my feet on the floor. I needed to stop. Just stop. I’d known all this before I’d arrived,so the confirmation shouldn’t take a toll. I needed to do what I’d come here to do.
The house was strange. I’d noticed it last night in the dark, but daylight and a clearer head made it sharper. The hallway outside the guest room was too quiet. Not the quiet of an empty house, but the quiet of a space that had been engineered to be quiet. The walls were thick. The floor didn’t creak. There was a density to the construction that went beyond normal residential building.
My mother had mentioned Travis’s reclusiveness once, about six months after the funeral. She’d called it hissituation, with the tone she reserved for people who’d failed to hold themselves together after tragedy.
Your father heard that Travis has become some sort of a hermit. Barely leaves that house of his. Such a shame. He was always a bit odd, but Naomi kept him grounded.
The compound made a certain kind of sense for a man who never left. The security gate, the underground level, the controlled corridors, the pool. If your whole world was inside, you’d build it to be everything you needed. She’d described it like he’d given up, but this wasn’t giving up. This was engineering. A life designed down to the square foot.
What didn’t make sense were the bruises.
