"And what brings an independent investigator to my gate in the middle of the night?" Rhett asked. Foley studied him with something that looked like professional recognition. "A boy walked into your clubhouse tonight," he said. "I believe he's connected to a case I've been working for fourteen months. The woman who hired me was Norah Mercer."
Rhett kept his face still with an effort he would later remember as physical pain. Norah's name had existed in the clubhouse for years as an absence rather than a person: a faded photograph, an unanswered question, a disappearance Caleb would never explain. For a stranger to speak it now was either a extraordinary piece of luck or an extraordinarily precise threat. Rhett looked at the card without taking it. "If you're lying," he said, "you chose a poor place to do it."
"I understand," Foley replied. "And if you don't believe me, you shouldn't. Verify what I say before you decide whether to trust anything else." He gave the number of his state investigator's license and offered a second contact who could confirm his business existed. Rhett took the card, then told him to park beneath the light and leave his keys where they could be seen.
Foley entered the common room to find four adults waiting and a fresh cup of coffee steaming at an empty chair. Jace had moved Eli into the workshop office, where the boy could see the hall but not be seen from the front windows. Eli protested until Mara explained that listening through a partially open door was still safer than sitting opposite a stranger whose purpose they had not established. It was a compromise that would have annoyed Rhett on any ordinary night, but this was no ordinary night.
"Start with how you met Norah," Rhett told Foley. Foley looked at the coffee before answering. "She contacted me fourteen months ago through an attorney I used to work with. She'd already been living under another identity for years, moving whenever she believed somebody had connected a location to her real name."
He paused to let the contradiction settle. "She wasn't a woman who had run away from her family. She was a woman trying to stay alive long enough to understand who destroyed it."
"Caleb told her what he was investigating," Mara said. It was more conclusion than question. Foley nodded. "He told her enough that she understood the danger. She helped him map warehouse accounts before she went underground. Their original idea was that separating would keep at least one parent alive to protect their child."
Rhett gripped the back of a chair. He remembered being angry with Caleb for refusing to explain Norah's absence, interpreting his friend's silence as pride or a damaged marriage. At the time, it had been easier to imagine a domestic sorrow than an organized threat. He had failed to imagine that silence might be the only shield Caleb believed he could give his wife.