His Price, My Marriage

Chapter 8: What Otis Found

Three days passed before Otis called again. In that time, Amara learned something about waiting nobody had properly warned her about. It didn't feel like patience.

It felt like holding her breath in pieces, letting go just enough to survive the next hour, then doing it again.

She kept busy the only way she knew how. She went back to her shift at the diner twice. Kingsley suggested she keep some part of her old life going, rather than let the marriage swallow every hour of her days.

Standing behind the counter, pouring coffee, gave her hands something to do. Her mind kept circling the same questions anyway.

Daniel noticed the shift the moment she walked in for her Tuesday shift.

"You look different," he said, tying his apron. "Not bad difference. Just less braced for impact."

"I don't know if that's true," Amara said. Though she suspected he wasn't wrong.

"Is it him? The husband?"

She thought about how much to give him. "It's complicated. He's not what I expected. I don't know what to call this yet."

Daniel studied her for a moment. "As long as you're safe. That's all I care about. Everything else, you can figure out at your own pace."

"I'm safe," she said. Saying it out loud, she found she mostly believed it.

She almost told him about the messages. The ones that deleted themselves. The name Thaddeus Cole, which she hadn't heard yet but could feel coming, the way you feel weather change before the sky actually shifts. She didn't tell him.

Not because she didn't trust him, but because some weights weren't fair to hand to someone who couldn't do anything with them except worry.

Her father called once during those three days. She let it go to voicemail, then listened to the message twice. His voice sounded thinner than she remembered.

Amara. I know you need space. I've been trying to remember anything else that might help. There's a name I keep coming back to. Someone Reginald mentioned once, years ago, in passing. I don't know if it means anything. Call me when you're ready. I'll wait as long as you need.

She didn't call back right away. But she saved the message. Something about the tone, patient instead of pleading, made her think her father had finally understood something. Trust wasn't a thing he could rush back into.

She thought about calling Ifeoma instead. She got as far as opening the contact, thumb hovering over the call button, before she put the phone down again. There wasn't a version of this she could explain to her sister yet that wouldn't terrify her.

Ifeoma was still under the impression that Amara had married a serious, wealthy man in a whirlwind, nothing more complicated than that. Amara wasn't ready to be the one who took that simple version away from her.

Kingsley spent most of those three days in the study. He didn't shut her out of it the way he might have a week earlier.

But she noticed the waiting wore on him too. He ate less.

His answers came a beat slower than usual, like part of his mind was always somewhere else, running numbers she couldn't see.

She started bringing him tea in the evenings, unasked, the way Mrs. Alcott brought coffee every morning without being told. The first time, he looked at the cup like he wasn't sure what to do with the gesture.

By the third night, he'd started leaving a space cleared on the desk for it before she even walked in.

"You don't have to do this," he said, on the third night.

"I know I don't have to." She set the cup down anyway. "I want to. There's a difference."

On the second night, she found him standing in front of the corkboard well past midnight. Not working. Just looking at the photograph of his father and Franklin, pinned back in its corner.

"You should sleep," she said, echoing his own words back at him.

"I keep thinking about what my mother would say." He didn't turn around.

"If she knew I was doing this. Chasing down her husband's brother after thirty years of silence. I don't know if she'd be proud of me for finally asking. Or furious that I'm dragging up what she spent her life trying to bury."

"Maybe both," Amara said, coming to stand beside him.

"People are usually more than one feeling at a time."

"That's an uncomfortably accurate thing to say. In a room built entirely out of unresolved grief."

"I'm not trying to be comfortable," she said.

"I'm trying to be honest. You've had enough people around you who chose comfort over honesty. Your whole family is good at silence."

Kingsley looked at her then. Something almost like a smile tugged at his mouth, tired but real.

"You've gotten braver with me. I've noticed."

"I've had an educational week."

That got a real laugh out of him, short and surprised, like it slipped out before he'd decided whether to let it. Amara liked the sound of it more than she expected.

This careful, guarded man, laughing in a room full of other people's secrets.

"Can I ask you something," she said, once the laugh had faded.

"Do you regret it? Marrying me into all of this?"

Kingsley considered the question with the same weight he gave most things.

"No. I regret that it cost you a version of your life you didn't choose. I don't regret that you're the one standing here with me. Those feel like two different things to hold, and I've stopped trying to make them agree with each other."

"That's a very careful answer."

"I'm a careful man," he said. "You've noticed that too, I assume."

"I have," Amara admitted.

"I'm starting to think being careful isn't the same thing as cold. I think I got those confused about you, at the start."

Something shifted in his face at that, quiet and unguarded, and for a moment neither of them said anything else.

Otis called on the morning of the fourth day. Kingsley put him on speaker without asking. A small thing, but it told Amara how far the week had shifted things.

"I found him," Otis said, no preamble.

The bluntness of a man who knew easing into hard news rarely helped. "The third man on that dock. Took longer than expected. He's been living under a different name for close to three decades. That tells you how badly he wanted to stay buried."

"Who is he," Kingsley asked.

"His real name is Thaddeus Cole."

The name landed in the study like a stone dropped into still water. The ripples took a moment to reach either of them.

"Cole," Amara repeated. "As in Reginald Cole."

"His younger brother," Otis said.

"Officially, Reginald has always claimed to be an only child. No public record of a sibling. No birth announcement. Nothing. I found a baptismal record in a small parish two counties over, buried in archives nobody bothers to digitize anymore. Thaddeus Cole, born four years after Reginald. Same parents. Somewhere along the way, the family scrubbed almost every trace of him."

"Why would they erase a member of their own family," Amara asked.

"I don't know yet," Otis said.

"But here's what I do know. Thaddeus Cole has been living under the name Edwin Marsh for twenty-eight years. Runs a modest import business two states over. Nothing flashy. Married, no children. Keeps to himself. The kind of quiet life a man builds when he's spent decades making sure nobody comes looking."

Kingsley had gone still. The stillness Amara had learned meant he was working through something too big to say out loud all at once.

"You're telling me Reginald Cole has a brother," he said slowly.

"One who's been hiding in plain sight for almost thirty years. And that brother was standing on the same dock as my father and my uncle. In a photograph neither of them wanted him in."

"That's what I'm telling you, yes."

"Do you think he knows what happened to my father? What role did Reginald and Franklin actually play?"

"I think," Otis said, choosing his words carefully, "a man who spent twenty-eight years erasing his own identity knows more than he'd ever say freely. Whether he's willing to talk to you is a different question."

"I want to talk to him."

"Figured you would. I have an address. I'd advise against showing up unannounced, though. A man that is careful about hiding won't respond well to being caught off guard. If you want him to say anything at all, you'll need to approach this carefully. Maybe let your wife take the lead. She's not the one carrying the Adair name into the room."

Amara felt Kingsley's eyes shift to her.

"Would you be willing," he asked. "To reach out first."

"If it helps, yes." Something tightened in her stomach at the thought of it. Another buried piece of this puzzle, and no idea what waited behind it.

"But I want you close by. I'm not doing this part alone. Even if I'm the one at the door."

"You won't be alone," Kingsley said. "I promise you that."

"How do we even approach him," Amara asked. "A man who's spent twenty-eight years making sure nobody finds him. He's not going to open the door because I knock and smile."

"No," Otis agreed. "You'll need a reason he can't easily refuse. Something that doesn't sound like a threat, but also doesn't sound like nothing. I'd suggest framing it as a family matter. Tell him you're trying to locate a relative for reasons that have nothing to do with Reginald directly. Let him assume the stakes are smaller than they are. People are more likely to open a door when they think the conversation behind it is manageable."

"That feels like lying to him," Amara said.

"It's not lying," Otis said. "It's giving him a door he's willing to walk through. What happens once he's through it is a different matter entirely."

Otis gave them the address before hanging up. He warned them to move carefully. Thaddeus Cole had spent enough years hiding to notice if he was being watched again. After the call ended, the study went quiet in a way that felt heavier than the silences before it.

A new name. A new thread. A door that could lead somewhere worse than either of them had imagined.

"Reginald has a brother he erased," Amara said, testing the shape of it out loud. "Just like you have an uncle everyone told you was dead.

Both families seem to specialize in disappearing people instead of dealing with them."

"It's starting to feel less like coincidence," Kingsley said. "More like a pattern neither family ever wanted examined too closely."

"Do you think Thaddeus is the one sending the messages? The ones that keep deleting themselves?"

Kingsley thought about that for a while. "It's possible. A man skilled enough at disappearing for thirty years might also know how to send a message that vanishes before anyone can trace it.

But I don't know why he'd want us to find him now. Not after decades of making sure nobody could."

"Maybe he's tired," Amara said quietly. "Maybe carrying a secret that long gets heavier than the fear of what happens if it comes out. I understand that better than I did two weeks ago."

Kingsley's expression softened, watching her say it. "You're thinking about your father."

"I'm thinking about all of us. Your family. Mine. Maybe Thaddeus too, if he really is the one reaching out." She paused.

"Everyone in this story chose silence because it felt safer. None of us actually feel safer for it. We just feel more alone."

Kingsley reached for her hand. An easy motion now, nothing like the careful distance of their wedding day.

"Then let's not choose that anymore," he said.

"Whatever we find at that address, we find it together. We say it out loud the moment we know it. No more rationing the truth. I've watched that strategy fail everyone who tried it."

Amara squeezed his hand. Something steady settled into her chest despite everything still ahead of them.

"Together," she agreed. "Let's go find out what Edwin Marsh has been running from for twenty-eight years."

They spent the rest of that evening planning, laying out a route, a cover story, and a day to travel. Kingsley wanted to leave within the week.

Amara wanted to give it a few more days, enough time to steady herself before walking into another stranger's carefully buried life and asking him to hand over the one thing he'd spent nearly three decades protecting.

"We'll go Thursday," Kingsley said finally. "That gives you the time you're asking for, and it doesn't give whoever's watching us too much room to get ahead of what we're planning."

"Thursday," Amara agreed.

Outside the study window, the afternoon slid slowly toward evening. Two states away, a man who had spent nearly three decades making sure nobody ever found him was about to learn that the past he buried so carefully had finally figured out how to dig itself back up.