She didn't go back to the office.
That was the first decision — small, practical, the kind that didn't require much thought. The office was a place Jacob Cain had been and could be again and the fourteen floors and the glass partitions and the chrome waiting room chairs had proven themselves insufficient and she was done with insufficient.
She called her manager on Tuesday morning and said there had been a family emergency and she needed time and her manager said of course, take whatever you need, we're all thinking of you after yesterday and Indigo said thank you and hung up and that was the end of that chapter of her life probably though she didn't think about it in those terms at the time.
Lucas worked from home on Tuesday. She didn't ask him to — he just didn't leave, just moved his laptop to the kitchen table and took his calls quietly and was there when she came out of the bedroom and there when she went back in and there in the evening when she sat on the sofa and looked at nothing for a long time.
She appreciated it. She told him so.
He said of course.
The grief for Rebecca came in the specific non-linear way grief did — not as a constant weight but as ambushes. She'd be making coffee and it would arrive, or standing in the shower, or looking at her phone and seeing Rebecca's name in the messages and remembering. Each time it arrived she let it do what it needed to do and then she put it somewhere and kept moving because the alternative was to stop and stopping was not something she was doing right now.
She thought about calling Rebecca's sister. She picked up the phone to do it twice and put it down both times because she didn't know what to say that wasn't simultaneously true and terrible — that Rebecca had died because of her, because of something that had started five years ago in a forest that had nothing to do with Rebecca who had just been someone kind enough to sit at the adjacent desk and make fresh coffee and say I'm here.
She'd say it eventually. She'd find the words eventually.
Not yet.
On Wednesday she started paying attention to Lucas in a different way.
Not obviously. She'd learned a long time ago how to pay attention without looking like she was paying attention — it was the same skill she used to check exits and scan treelines, the low level monitoring that ran underneath everything else. She applied it to Lucas on Wednesday morning over breakfast and she wasn't sure what she was looking for exactly. Just — something. The thing she'd been half seeing for three years that came and went in his face too quickly to name.
She watched him make toast. She watched him check his phone. She watched him look at the news on his laptop and close it quickly when he saw what was on it.
She noted that.
"Anything new," she said, nodding at the laptop.
"Work stuff," he said. "Nothing important."
She drank her coffee.
She noted that too.
It was small things. That was the way of it — nothing large enough to constitute evidence, nothing she could point to and say this, this is the thing. Just the accumulation of small things that her brain had been filing for three years under the heading parts of someone you never fully know and was now retrieving and reexamining under a different light.
The way he always knew when she was about to say something difficult before she said it. She'd always found that quality — attentiveness, she'd called it, real listening — one of the things she loved most about him. She looked at it differently now. The way he sometimes asked questions that assumed knowledge he shouldn't have had — small things, details about her routine or her past that she didn't remember telling him. The midnight work call the night after the Sarah Beaumont news report. The way he'd said I know before she'd told him about the office attack.
I saw it on the news he'd said.
She went back through every news notification on her phone from that morning. The office attack had broken on local news at approximately twelve thirty. She'd called him at eleven fifty eight.
Thirty two minutes before it was on the news.
She sat with that for a long time on Wednesday afternoon while Lucas was on a call in the bedroom with the door closed.
She sat with it and she breathed and she did not do what her body wanted to do which was walk into that bedroom and ask him directly because asking directly meant showing her hand and showing her hand meant losing the one advantage she had which was that he didn't know she knew.
If she knew. If this was what she thought it was and not her brain doing what traumatised brains did which was find patterns in things that were just coincidences, find threat in things that were just ordinary, turn the people closest to you into suspects because trust was a thing that had been taken from her in a forest when she was seventeen and she'd never fully rebuilt it.
She needed to be sure.
She wasn't sure yet.
Thursday she asked him about his family.
They'd talked about his family before — or he'd talked and she'd listened and she'd built a picture from the pieces he'd offered. Father not in the picture. Mother died when he was twelve. Grew up in the system mostly, a couple of foster placements, nothing that stuck. He told it without self pity, with the matter of fact tone of someone who had processed it long ago and filed it as just the shape of his life rather than a wound. She'd respected that about him. The absence of performance around it.
She'd never pushed. It hadn't felt like her place to push.
On Thursday morning she pushed.
"You never talk about your dad," she said. They were on the sofa, the television on low, her feet tucked up beside her the way they always were in the evenings. Normal. Ordinary. Just two people on a sofa.
Lucas looked at her.
"Not much to say," he said.
"You've never said anything. Not really." She kept her voice light. Curious. The tone of someone asking because they care rather than because they need to know. "What happened to him."
A pause. Lucas looked at the television.
"He wasn't around," he said.
"Like he left or—"
"He just wasn't around." His voice had something in it she hadn't heard before — not quite flatness, not quite the careful neutral quality, something harder underneath both of those. "I didn't know him."
"Do you know where he is now?"
Lucas looked at her.
The look lasted slightly too long. Just slightly. Just enough.
"No," he said.
She held his gaze and smiled and looked back at the television and inside her chest something that had been a suspicion for two days became something colder and more certain and considerably harder to carry.
She kept her breathing even.
She kept her face doing what faces did on sofas on Thursday evenings with the television on low.
Inside she was absolutely still.
Friday she went through his phone.
She wasn't proud of it. She was aware it was a violation and she was aware that if she was wrong it was the kind of violation that didn't have a good recovery and she did it anyway because being wrong was survivable and the alternative to being wrong was not.
He was in the shower. She had maybe seven minutes.
She knew his passcode — she'd seen him enter it enough times over three years that it lived in her peripheral memory without her ever consciously filing it. Four digits. She typed them in and the phone opened and she went to the messages.
Most of it was normal. Work threads, group chats, the back and forth of an ordinary life. She went through it fast, not reading, just scanning, looking for something that didn't fit the pattern.
She found it in a thread with no contact name. Just a number. The messages were sparse and short in the way of people who had agreed on brevity.
The most recent one was from four days ago.
Office building 14th floor. She works there.
And before that, two weeks ago:
New address attached. Confirmed she's still there.
And before that, a month ago:
Still with her. No suspicion.
She stared at the screen.
Her hands were completely steady. She noticed that distantly — the same way she'd noticed it loading the gun in a shed in a forest, the specific steadiness that arrived when things became very clear and very serious and the body stopped having the luxury of shaking.
She heard the shower turn off.
She put the phone back exactly where it had been. Same angle, same screen orientation, face down on the nightstand. She walked out of the bedroom and into the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood at the window looking at the street below.
She heard him come out of the bathroom. Heard him go back to the bedroom. Heard the particular sounds of someone getting dressed.
He came into the kitchen.
"Tea?" she said.
"Please," he said.
She made two cups. She handed him one. She stood at the window with hers and looked at the street and felt the shape of what she now knew settling around her like something heavy and permanent.
Lucas stood at the kitchen table and drank his tea and looked at his phone and she watched his reflection in the window glass and thought about three years. About the first time she'd met him, the bar on Lexington where Rebecca had dragged her to a colleague's birthday and Lucas had been there somehow, a friend of a friend of someone, and they'd talked for three hours and she'd thought I'm allowed to have this, I've worked hard enough for ordinary, I'm allowed to have this.
She thought about that now.
She thought about what it cost to build something and what it cost to lose it and the specific way those two costs were different from each other.
She turned away from the window.
"I need to go out," she said.
Lucas looked up. "Where."
"Just — errands. I won't be long." She picked up her jacket and her bag. "Text me if you need anything."
She left before he could say anything else.
She walked for a long time.
No destination. Just walking, the way she used to walk in the first year in New York when the apartment felt too small and the city felt like the only thing big enough to hold what she was carrying. Midtown to downtown, the streets changing character as she went, the crowds thinning and thickening in the particular rhythm of a Friday afternoon.
She walked and she thought.
She thought about what she knew and what she could prove and what the difference between those two things meant practically. She thought about the police — the detective who'd called about Rebecca, the Vicrock file that was technically still open. She thought about what she'd say and how she'd say it and whether it would matter in time.
She thought about Lucas.
She thought about the way he'd held her after Rebecca. The way he'd said I'm so sorry into her hair and she'd believed it and maybe it had even been true — maybe he had been sorry, maybe that was the worst version of it, that he was genuinely sorry and had done it anyway because Jacob Cain was his father and whatever that meant to him outweighed everything else.
She stopped at a crossing and waited for the light.
She thought about Jacob Cain somewhere in this city with an axe.
She thought about Rebecca.
She thought about Vicrock. About Jett saying go and meaning it. About Anastasia's hand finding hers in the dark. About Elizabeth asking someone to take it out.
She thought about the bow rack at the ScreamForHell campsite. About the arrow going through Elizabeth's stomach and the specific sound of the string releasing — too small for what it did, she'd always thought that, the sound was too small for what it did.
The light changed.
She crossed the street.
She pulled out her phone and found the number for the detective who'd called about Rebecca and pressed call and stood on the pavement in the Friday afternoon crowd and waited for him to pick up.
He picked up on the third ring.
"This is Indigo Derby," she said. "I know who killed Rebecca Ellison. I know who killed Ben Kowalski." She paused. "And I know where it's going."
A silence on the other end of the line.
"Ms Derby," the detective said carefully. "Can you come in."
"Yes," she said. "But first I need you to listen to me."
She got home at seven.
Lucas was in the kitchen making dinner. The smell of it reached her in the hallway — something with garlic, something that on any other evening would have been exactly right.
She hung up her jacket.
She stood in the hallway for a moment and looked at the kitchen doorway and the light coming through it and the sound of him moving around in there and felt the particular grief of a thing that was already over even though it hadn't finished yet.
She went into the kitchen.
"Hey," he said, not looking up from the pan. "Good walk?"
"Yeah," she said.
She sat down at the kitchen table. She looked at his back — the particular set of his shoulders, the way he stood at the stove, all the physical vocabulary of someone she knew better than she'd known anyone since Vicrock.
"Lucas," she said.
He turned around.
She looked at him. He looked at her.
In his face the thing she'd never been able to name was fully visible now — not because it had changed but because she finally knew what she was looking at. Not malice. Not coldness. Something more complicated and considerably harder to look at than either of those.
He knew she knew.
She could see it — the moment he saw it in her face, the recalibration, the particular stillness that came over him.
Neither of them said anything for a long moment.
"How long," she said finally.
He set the spoon down on the counter.
"From the beginning," he said.
She'd known that. She'd known it since the phone. She'd still needed him to say it.
"He's your father," she said.
"Yes."
"Jacob Cain."
"Yes."
She looked at him. At the face she'd looked at for three years and the person behind it that she'd never fully known and now knew too much about.
"Did you ever—" She stopped. Started again. "Was any of it—"
"Yes," he said. Before she'd finished. Like he knew the question. Like he'd been waiting for it.
She looked at her hands on the table.
"I didn't know what he was going to do," Lucas said. "In the beginning I just — he found me. After years of nothing he found me and he said he needed help and I didn't know—" His voice did something. "I didn't know what I was helping with. Not at first."
"And then you did," she said.
A silence.
"And then I did," he said.
She looked up at him.
There was something in his face that she'd never seen there before — not the careful neutral quality, not the thing underneath she couldn't name. Something rawer than both of those. Something that looked like a person who had been two things at once for three years and was exhausted by it.
She thought about what that cost. She thought about whether it mattered.
She thought about Rebecca.
She stood up from the table.
"Indigo—"
"Don't," she said.
She picked up her jacket from the hallway. She picked up her bag. She stood at the front door with her hand on the lock and didn't turn around.
"He's going to kill you," Lucas said from the kitchen. His voice was different now. Quiet and certain and stripped of everything except the fact of it. "Whatever you're planning. Whatever you think you're going to do. He's not going to stop."
"I know," she said.
"You don't know what he is now. What he's like. You shot him and it—" He stopped. "He's not the same. He can't be stopped the way normal people can be stopped."
"I know that too," she said.
She turned the lock.
"Indigo." His voice cracked slightly on it. Just slightly.
She opened the door.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I know that doesn't—I know. But I am."
She stood in the open doorway for a moment.
"I know you are," she said.
She left.
She was three blocks away when she heard it.
A single sound. She knew what it was before she'd turned around — the particular quality of it, the specific note of something that ended things. She'd heard it before. She'd made it before.
A gunshot. From the direction of her building.
She stood on the pavement and looked back at the building and the ordinary Friday evening street and felt the shape of what had just happened arriving in her the way bad things arrived — too fast to prepare for, too certain to deny.
She stood there for a long moment.
Then she took out her phone and called the detective.
"There's been a shot fired," she said, when he picked up. She gave him the address. She gave it to him in the flat level voice of someone who had learned to deliver terrible information without the information destroying the delivery.
She hung up.
She stood on the pavement and looked at the building and thought about Lucas making pasta on a Tuesday, Lucas saying come home on a Monday, Lucas's arm around her in the hallway when she came back from the fire escape with broken glass on her shoes and wine on the pavement.
She thought about Jacob Cain somewhere in that building.
She thought about a father who had waited five years and crossed a city and killed a corner store worker and a woman named Rebecca Ellison and a man named Ben Kowalski and had finally run out of patience with a son who couldn't finish the job.
She thought about what Lucas had said.
He's not the same. He can't be stopped the way normal people can be stopped.
She looked at her hands.
Then she looked north.
Vicrock was north.
She'd known since Friday that it was going to end there. She'd known it with the particular certainty of things that were true before you'd consciously arrived at them — the way the forest had been the beginning and would have to be the end, the way Jacob Cain would follow her there because that was where it had started and that was the only place either of them knew how to finish it.
She'd been waiting to be ready.
She looked at her hands one more time.
She was ready.
She started walking.