Page 71 of Hunted in the Silence

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Carson and Nora’s house was on a tree-lined street in the east side of Blackridge, a craftsman with a covered porch and warm light in every window. There was a wreath on the door that Nora had put up because she started decorating in November, and Carson had learned not to have opinions about it.

Cole had driven past it once during the investigation, in the early days when he was still learning the layout of the town, and had taken note of it the way he everything.

Now he pulled into the driveway on a Saturday evening with Brynn in the passenger seat. He could see movement inside through the windows and sat for a moment with the engine off.

“Ready?” Brynn asked.

He looked at the warm light in the windows and the shadows of people moving behind them, the warmth of a house that was filled with the love of friends and family, and considered everything that still lay ahead.

“Yes,” he said eventually.

They went up the porch steps hand in hand, and Nora was standing in the open doorway before they had a chance to even knock, which, Cole would learn, said everything about who she was as a person. She was a few years younger than Carson, dark-eyed and direct and warm in a way that made people feel welcome.

Nora shook Cole’s hand and then looked at Brynn with a wide smile and said, “I’ve wanted to meet you for a while. Carson talks about your work like it’s the thing that makes his department worth running.”

Brynn looked briefly and genuinely surprised, which Cole noticed because Brynn was rarely surprised by anything. “That’s…generous of him,” she said.

“It’s true,” Nora said.

Cole gave Brynn a soft smile. He’d noticed from the start that she drew people like this effortlessly.

Inside the house was everything the outside promised. Warm and lived-in, the kind of clean that came from a household that had given up on perfect and settled into comfortable, which was its own kind of perfection. A little girl with Carson’s eyes and Nora’s confidence appeared from around the corner of the hallway, looked Cole and Brynn up and down with the frank appraisal of a toddler who hadn’t yet learned social boundaries, and said to Brynn, “Your hair is pretty,” and disappeared again before anyone could respond.

“That’s Mae,” Nora said with a chuckle. “She says what she thinks.”

“I like her,” Brynn said.

The kitchen was the center of the house where everyone gathered as if it had its own gravitational pull. Carson was at the stove, the picture of a man who knew what he was doing and didn’t need help with it. He looked up when Cole and Brynn came in and said, “Maddox. Brynn.”

Cole gave a friendly nod, and Brynn smiled her own greeting.

Dax was at the kitchen island with a beer, talking to a woman Cole recognized from her author photo on the back of Brynn’s paperback. Quinn Barrett, now Mercer, was smaller than her photo suggested, with dark eyes and the quick, assessing attention of someone who noticed everything. She looked at Cole when he came in and said, “You’re the one who texted me.”

“I am,” he responded.

“Good instincts.” She turned to look at Brynn.

Cole watched Brynn’s expression tighten, caught off guard. It took only a half-second for her to compose herself, and then she looked at Cole with an expression he could read perfectly.

He gave her a small nod.

She turned back to Quinn. “Your book on the Barrett case,” she said. “I’ve read it three times. The section on institutional failure in the third chapter is the most accurate thing I’ve seen written about the way the system protects itself at the expense of the people it’s supposed to serve.”

Quinn took a moment to study her. “That section took me four months to get right,” she said. “I threw it out twice.” She tilted her head slightly. “You work in advocacy.”

“Six years,” Brynn said proudly. “I run the Blackridge Victim Advocacy Center.”

“I know,” Quinn said. “Dax told me. And Cole told me. And Carson told me before I got here.” The women shared a brief laugh. “I’d like to talk to you about the piece I’m working on. Not tonight, not in the middle of dinner, but soon. I think what you’ve built at that center is part of a story I’ve been trying to tell for two years and haven’t found the right way into yet.”

Brynn met her eyes steadily, pride and excitement filling them. “All right. I’ll look forward to it.”

Quinn nodded once, and the conversation moved on.

Silas and Harper arrived twenty minutes later, and Cole found out quickly that Harper Kane was the same person on the phone as she was in person—warm and sharp and slightly amused by most things, with the kind of confidence belonging to someone who understood people.

She shook Brynn’s hand as if they were old friends and addressed her with the same energy. Then she looked at Cole and said frankly, “You look better.”