The line hit Rhett harder than Foley could have known. He looked at the watch on the table, remembering Caleb's quiet insistence that he never give it away without understanding why. Five and a half years of winding it and keeping it safe had suddenly become part of a communication neither friend had fully explained. Caleb and Norah had not built a plan around Rhett's strength. They had built it around his habit of staying loyal long after loyalty stopped being convenient.
"Where is she now?" Rhett asked. Foley's expression changed for the first time. "I don't know exactly. She stopped making scheduled contact fifty-three days ago.
I traced her last known work to a company tied to Hale, and I have reasons to think she was investigating a facility near the river." He looked toward the hall. "That's why I was watching the roads tonight. Eli appeared on surveillance near that company's trucking yard, and I was afraid somebody else might have recognized him."
Rhett let Foley finish before answering. He did not like being watched, and he liked even less the idea that an investigator had located Eli before the club had known he existed. But Foley had brought documents, not merely claims, and the names and dates he provided could be checked against information already in Eli's notebook. "You'll go home," Rhett said. "You'll stay available by phone. We verify everything independently before we discuss anything else."
Foley accepted the decision without argument, which was another useful fact. At the doorway he glanced toward the workshop and said, "If the boy asks whether his mother is alive, tell him the last thing I can prove: she was alive fifty-three days ago. Don't give him a certainty I can't honestly provide." Then Deak escorted him to the sedan and waited until its lights had disappeared along the service road.
Eli was standing just beyond the workshop door when Rhett returned. His face had the careful stillness Rhett was beginning to recognize as a form of defense. "She hired him," Eli said. Rhett nodded, and the boy's jaw tightened. "She was alive all that time."
"We have evidence she was alive recently," Rhett said. "That doesn't tell us where she is now." Eli looked at him sharply. "I heard what he said. Don't turn it into something smaller because you think I can't handle it." Rhett accepted the correction, though it hurt to hear a child who had become accustomed to being managed with half-truths.
"You're right," he said. "Your mother was alive, and she hired him to investigate. She's been out of contact for fifty-three days, and we don't know what happened. We'll look for her, but I won't lie to you about what we can prove."
Eli nodded once, then returned to the couch and sat with the watch in his lap. He was visibly struggling with the difference between hope and evidence, a distinction his father had taught him so thoroughly that he could not abandon it even when his own heart demanded certainty. Mara sat beside him without speaking for several minutes. Eventually he leaned the smallest possible distance toward her, and she stayed where she was.