MINE TO BREAK

Chapter Five

On the second day, I find a phone.

Not by accident. I looked for it. Forty minutes of methodical movement through the parts of the house nobody told me I couldn't access — which, notably, is most of it. No locked doors. No escort. Either Draven trusts me, which seems unlikely, or he wants me to feel like he trusts me, which seems more likely, or he genuinely doesn't think I'll find anything worth finding.

I'm banking on the third one being a mistake.

The phone is in the second kitchen drawer, under a takeout menu and a pen that doesn't work. Prepaid. Old model. Someone left it there and forgot about it or left it there and wants to see what I do with it, and I have decided I don't care which.

I take it to the bathroom. Lock the door. Sit on the edge of the tub.

It has charge. No SIM, but there's wifi, and whoever set up this house didn't password-protect the guest network, which is either careless or another test and again — I don't care.

I open a browser.

I type my name.

Sierra Hayes missing returns nothing.

I stare at that for a moment. Try variations. Sierra Hayes Chicago. Woman missing Chicago. I add the date. I add the neighborhood.

Nothing.

I've been gone for thirty-six hours. I have a lease. I have a job — two, technically, both under the table, but still. I have a landlord who charges late fees if rent is three hours delayed. I have a gym membership I've never used and a library card I use constantly and a name on a buzzer in a building where the woman on the third floor watches everything through her peephole.

I have a father.

He lives in Connecticut. We talk every Sunday. He calls at eight, I pick up by eight-oh-two, we speak for exactly twenty minutes because that's how long it takes before we run out of things we're willing to say to each other. It's not a warm relationship. But it's consistent.

Last Sunday was four days ago.

This Sunday I'll be missing.

I search his name. Thomas Hayes. His number comes up on a directory site, same as always. His address. His work email.

No statements to the press. No police reports. No my daughter is missing anything.

I sit with that information for a while.

There's a version of this that makes sense. Maybe he doesn't know yet. Maybe thirty-six hours isn't long enough. Maybe he tried my cell — which is somewhere in the alley behind Fifth Street or at the bottom of a storm drain by now — and left a voicemail and is waiting.

I'm good at building versions that make sense. I've been doing it for eleven months. You have to. If you let yourself believe the worst explanation every time, you can't move. You just sit down somewhere and stay there.

I've never sat down.

But I look at the search results for a long time.

The bond — I've started calling it that in my head, because the woman in this house named Nadia used the word yesterday when she didn't know I was in the hallway, and I've been turning it over ever since — the bond does something new this afternoon.

I'm walking back through the main corridor when Draven comes down the stairs, and before I hear him or see him, something in my chest pulls left. Toward the staircase. Specific and physical, like a hand on my sternum, and then he appears and the pull settles into that pressure I've been pretending I don't notice and he looks at me and stops.

He reads my face.

He's very good at reading faces. Too good. The kind of good that takes years of practice or a specific type of attention and I haven't decided yet which one his is.

"What happened," he says. Not a question.

"Nothing."

"Sierra."

"I found a phone," I say. "In your kitchen drawer. I used your wifi. I looked for news of my disappearance." I watch him. "There isn't any."

He's still.

"Did you already know that?" I ask.

The pause is less than a second. I'd miss it if I wasn't watching for it.

"I suspected it was possible," he says.

"That's different from knowing."

"Yes."

"But not by much."

He comes down the last two steps. Stops at the bottom. We're eight feet apart, which feels like the right distance for this conversation — far enough that I can think, close enough that I can read him back.

"Your father," he says carefully, "may have reasons for staying quiet."

"What reasons make a father stay quiet when his daughter disappears?"

He looks at me. And I see it — small, controlled, almost immediately buried — something that looks like regret.

Not surprise.

Regret.

"You know him," I say.

"I know of him."

"That's the third time you've done that. Given me the smaller version of the true answer."

"I know."

"Stop it."

"Sierra—"

"No." Something tightens in my voice. I let it. "I have been patient. I have been reasonable. I ate your food and I slept in your bed and I asked polite questions and accepted non-answers because you told me that knowing too much too fast would make me run, and running would get me killed." I take one step forward. "But you know my father. And my father hasn't reported me missing. And you're standing there doing math in your head about how much to tell me, and I need you to understand that I am done waiting for you to finish."

The house is quiet around us.

He looks at me for a long moment. Whatever he's calculating, it takes time.

Then — not a decision, exactly. More like something giving way.

"Come with me," he says.

He walks toward the study.

And I follow, because I have been following him since I got in his car, and I hate that, and I also can't seem to stop, and I'm starting to think those two things are related in a way that has nothing to do with logic.

My chest pulls left again as I walk behind him.

Toward him.

Always toward him.

I ignore it.

I'm getting worse at that.