Ava Carver had not planned to come back at this hour, when the town existed in the thin, raw place between sleep and rumor. The road in unspooled ahead of her like a lesson she had refused to learn twice: the same strip of asphalt, the same silvered cornfields that had looked like sheets when they were kids. She drove slower than she needed to, letting the morning press against the glass. The town’s sign—pleasingly plain by corporate standards—came into view with the industrial silhouettes beyond it: a water tower, a cluster of low-slung buildings, and a big, neat campus on the ridge with a corporate logo she had tried to suppress in memory. Ethan had worked there. Ethan was gone.
She told herself she was coming to settle things, to close a chapter that had become a mess of unpaid bills and misplaced keys. That line felt false even as she spoke it. It was never about paperwork. The truth made her throat close: she was coming because the missing can’t be allowed to be missing without someone pushing back. For years Ava had read patterns where others saw noise. That work had taught her how to listen to a dataset the way a mother listens for a child’s breathing in the dark.
The building where Ethan had rented a one-bedroom above a laundromat was a sober, brick thing with a sagging stoop and a string of dead porch lights. There was police tape fluttered across the entry like a grin. A city vehicle from the company Ethan worked for idled on the street, a uniformed liaison talking quietly with a man in a cheap suit who looked practiced at being human. A cluster of neighbors hovered under blankets and coffee cups, faces drawn. Ava stepped out and let the weight of town press in: the same cramped concerns, the same gossip that could turn into a kind of domestic verdict.
A uniformed officer—young, tired—looked up when she approached. She told him her name, then said Ethan’s. He hesitated in that certain way that remembers a thin line between procedure and compassion. “We opened the apartment this morning. There was a disturbance. Does your brother have any family nearby?”
Ava almost laughed at the formality and the question together. “Yes,” she said. “I do. I’m it.” She watched the officer’s eyes flick to the corporate liaison and the man in the suit. That flick told her something she couldn’t get from any file: this was not only a police matter.
She was handed a faded evidence tag and a number to reach the detective on duty. The tag read like a polite accusation: visit recorded, property secured. When she asked about the liaison, the officer hedged. "They're representing the employer," he said. "They're handling certain kinds of access."
The building’s interior smelled like damp and detergent. Her heartbeat had a rhythm that belonged to years of waking up in far away places to unsettling things. She climbed the stairs, each step a little louder, and paused at the cracked door to Ethan’s apartment. The lock was forced from the inside; the chain hung limp. When she pushed the door it opened on a room that had been emptied like a closet left by someone in a hurry. Books lay face down on the couch; drawers were pulled out and overturned; a coffee mug was on its side with a dark dried ring. Whoever had rifled the place had been practical and intense: small cupboards bared of everyday things, a wall calendar with torn dates, a guitar case lying open and useless. Scattered in the chaos were the careful traces Ethan always left—post-it notes in a hand that liked crisp sentences, a small library of cipher textbooks, the thumb-sized calculator he kept in his pocket with the worn rubber buttons.
Ava moved through the space the way she had moved through evidence rooms in other lives: with a kind of reverence and a battery of questions. Her hands found the kitchen shelf where a framed photograph of both of them at a lake had been placed for years. She had always hated the staged smile in that picture—Ethan’s hair longer then, his eyes glinting with a secret he always reserved for family. The back of the frame popped up with a small click when she probed, and something cool and metallic slid into her palm: a thumb drive wrapped in a scrap of duct tape, the kind he used to wrap things to make them laughably permanent. She did not remember Ethan ever hiding things like this from her.