Rhett unbuckled the watch and laid it beneath the table lamp. The back carried a small engraving, a triangle crossed by a horizontal stroke. He had always assumed it was an old repairer's mark. Eli reached out, touched the symbol with one finger, and said, "Dad put that on things he had checked. He said it meant he trusted what was inside."
Jace studied the mark through a magnifying glass borrowed from Mara's tool drawer. There was nothing obvious behind it, no compartment that opened when pressed, no miraculous hidden screen or secret message. It was simply a deliberate symbol on an object Caleb had chosen to protect. That made it more unsettling, because Caleb had never wasted symbolism on anything he expected strangers to understand.
"When did your mother disappear?" Rhett asked. Eli's expression changed almost imperceptibly. "When I was little.
Before Dad died. People said she left, but Dad never said that." He pressed the notebook closed. "I don't believe she wanted to leave me."
Rhett thought of Norah Mercer standing in the doorway of the clubhouse during a summer cookout years before. She had been smart, brisk, impatient with vague answers, and fiercely protective of her son without making the boy afraid of the world. She had worked in logistics long enough to recognize fraudulent paperwork on sight, and she and Caleb had argued cheerfully over whether numbers or machines were more likely to reveal a liar. Rhett had liked her immediately, then watched her vanish from his friend's life without an explanation Caleb was willing to give.
"How long have you been staying away from your aunt?" he asked. "Eight months," Eli said. "She had trouble paying rent, and I thought I was making things worse. There were other problems, too. I left before anybody could decide where to send me." His voice stayed level, but the final sentence revealed a fear older than the notebook.
Mara pushed a glass of water toward him. "We're going to find a safe way to deal with that," she said. "A real way, not a promise we can't keep. You need somewhere secure to sleep, and somebody who'll help figure out your legal situation."
Eli lifted the glass and stared at the surface of the water. "I came because of Dad," he said. "Not because I wanted somebody to fix me."
"You don't need fixing," Rhett replied. He heard Caleb in the stubborn line of the boy's mouth and tried not to let the resemblance do all his thinking. "You need adults who will actually do their jobs. That starts with us listening to what you've brought."
For the first time, Eli's grip on the notebook eased slightly. He turned the cover toward Jace and allowed the young man to photograph its pages so the original would not be handled more than necessary. Rhett watched Jace work and noticed that the boy kept count of every page as it passed. Eli had developed routines around protecting his information, and Rhett understood that those routines might be all that had stood between him and total despair.