Somewhere Between Us

Chapter 13: A Careful Distance

She started leaving earlier and coming home later, telling herself it was work, extra transcription hours, a lawyer client with an urgent deadline, when in truth she spent most of those hours in library archive rooms and municipal record offices, chasing a paper trail that kept splitting into smaller, more tangled threads the further she followed it.

Dylan noticed. Of course he noticed. He noticed everything about her lately, which used to feel like a comfort and now felt like a spotlight she couldn't step out of fast enough.

"You've been distant," he said one evening, catching her at the door before she could disappear into her room with her laptop and her growing folder of half-answers. "Distant" wasn't even the right word for it, not really, but she understood what he meant, the missed dinners, the shorter answers, the way she'd started angling her body slightly away from him on the couch instead of leaning in.

"I've had a lot going on."

"You've had a lot going on for three weeks. That's not a busy patch, that's a pattern." He wasn't accusing, not exactly, but there was an edge underneath the words, something hurt trying very hard to sound reasonable instead. "Did I do something?"

"No." The answer came too fast, too flat, and she watched him catch it, watched something close over his face in response. "It's not you. I promise."

"That's usually what people say right before it turns out to be exactly them." He said it lightly, an attempt at a joke that didn't quite land, and when she didn't laugh, something in his posture deflated slightly. "Zoey. Talk to me."

She almost did. She stood there with the word Meridian sitting on her tongue, with the whole tangled shape of what she'd found pressing up against the back of her teeth, and then she thought of his face if she was wrong, if this all amounted to nothing, some coincidental corporate paperwork that meant less than she feared, and thought, too, of his face if she was right, and found she couldn't bear either version enough to say it out loud.

"I'm just tired," she said instead. "It's not a big thing."

He looked at her for a long moment, and she watched him decide, the way he always did, not to push further, except this time it didn't look like patience. It looked like something closer to resignation, a door quietly closing rather than staying open.

"Okay," he said, and the single word carried more weight than the whole conversation before it. "Let me know when you're not tired anymore."

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't accuse her of anything. He just walked past her into his own room and closed the door with a soft, deliberate click that somehow landed harder than a slam would have, and Zoey stood in the hallway with her folder of half-answers and felt, for the first time since the wedding, genuinely, uselessly alone.

The site of the old Meridian building was, twelve years later, a parking structure for a mid-rise office complex, flat, forgettable, no plaque, no memorial, nothing to suggest six people had died there in a fire that may or may not have been an accident. Zoey stood on the sidewalk across the street on her lunch break, looking at the concrete ramp where the lobby used to be, and felt the strange, disorienting grief of visiting a grave that had been paved over.

She'd found the name of a former building superintendent through an old tenant association newsletter, digitized and half-forgotten in a local historical society's archive, a man named Robert Ferris, who according to the newsletter had worked the building for over a decade before the fire ended his employment along with everything else. It had taken her three phone calls and one very awkward conversation with his daughter to track him down to an assisted living facility forty minutes outside the city.

He was eighty-one, sharp-eyed despite the wheelchair, and delighted to have a visitor who wasn't staff or family.

"Meridian," he said, when she explained why she'd come, and something shifted behind his eyes, old, careful, the look of a man deciding how much of something he still remembered. "Long time since anyone's asked about that place."

"I'm trying to understand what happened. My father, Kelvin Adams, died in the fire."

"I'm sorry for that. Truly." He was quiet a moment, hands folded in his lap. "I'll tell you what I told the investigators back then, for whatever it's worth, which wasn't much at the time. That building had problems before the fire. Wiring complaints going back years, reports I filed myself that never got actioned. Ownership kept promising repairs and never following through."

"Do you know why?"

"Money, probably, same as everything." He shrugged, though something in his expression suggested he didn't fully believe his own explanation. "But there was one thing that always sat strange with me. The night of the fire, it happened late, past eleven. Building was mostly empty by then, except for a handful of tenants working late and the cleaning crew. I've always wondered why the timing worked out that way. If it'd happened three hours earlier, at rush hour, when the lobby's full of people coming and going, it would've been a s*******r. Instead it was contained enough that only the people on the upper floors got caught."

"What are you saying?"

Ferris hesitated, the careful look returning. "I'm saying it always felt less like bad luck and more like someone knew the building's schedule. Knew when it'd be quiet enough to control, and knew exactly which floor to worry about." He looked at her directly then, something apologetic in his face. "There was talk, back then, that somebody important was supposed to be up on that floor that night. Somebody who wasn't, in the end, because plans changed last minute. Your father worked late covering for a colleague who called out sick. I've always wondered if he ended up in the wrong place because somebody else ended up, by luck, in the right one."

Zoey sat very still, the words settling over her like something cold. Somebody important. Supposed to be up on that floor. It didn't name anyone. It didn't prove anything. But it planted a shape in her mind she couldn't unsee, that the fire hadn't been random at all, that it had been aimed, deliberately, at someone who simply hadn't been there, and that her father had died standing, unknowingly, in a space meant for someone else's death.

"Do you know who?" she asked. "The person who was supposed to be there?"

"No," Ferris said, and she believed him. "That's just the shape of the story I was told, secondhand, years after the fact. Might not even be true. Old buildings collect rumors the way they collect dust." He studied her for a moment, something gentler settling into his face. "But you didn't come here for comfort, did you. You came here because you already suspected something like this."

"I did," she admitted, quiet.

"Then I'm sorry I couldn't give you more than a shape." He reached over, patted her hand once, an old man's gesture of kindness toward a grief he recognized. "I hope you find whoever it was. I hope, more than that, it gives you something like peace when you do."

She sat in her car outside the facility for a long time afterward, the shape of it circling in her mind, somebody important, supposed to be up on that floor, plans changed last minute, turning it over against everything else she'd gathered: the Sterling connection, the trust clause, the brake line, Feld's gossip about a man reappearing out of nowhere after years off the map.

It didn't add up to a name. It didn't add up to proof. But it added up, unmistakably, to a shape she recognized now with a kind of sick, sinking clarity, the fire hadn't killed the man it was meant for. Someone else had survived that night, a decade ago, walked away from a death meant to be theirs, while her father paid the price of standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She drove home with the radio off, the silence a kind of company, and by the time she pulled into the garage, she'd made a decision she wasn't proud of and couldn't quite undo, she wasn't ready to tell Dylan. Not the fire, not Meridian, not any of it. Not until she understood, with something more solid than an old man's memory and a name buried in a dissolved LLC filing, exactly what she'd be handing him if she did.

She found him in the kitchen when she got upstairs, later than she'd meant to be, and he looked up from the stove with an expression carefully wiped of the earlier hurt, though it hadn't fully disappeared.

"You're late," he said, not unkindly.

"I know. I'm sorry." She meant it, more than the words could carry. "Long day."

"You keep having those." He turned back to the stove, and something in the set of his shoulders told her, clearly, that whatever patience he'd been extending her had started, quietly, to run out. "Zoey. Is something actually wrong? And I mean actually. Not the version you tell me to make me stop asking."

She looked at him, tired, hurt, still trying, despite everything, to reach her, and felt the lie form and settle on her tongue before she'd fully decided to say it.

"No," she said. "Nothing's wrong."

He didn't believe her. She could see it in the careful, guarded way he nodded and turned back to the stove, and she hated, more than anything else that day, how easily she'd let the gap between them widen just a little further.