Storm Road

The storm reaches Mercer Lake before we do. Wipers fail at the job from the second the first sheet of rain hits the windshield. Blue lights smear across wet asphalt. Tessa sits in the passenger seat of Nico's SUV with both hands braced on the dash as if she can physically drag the road toward us faster.

"He'll talk before he runs," she says over the weather. "Owen always needs the room to agree he was noble."

"And if Poppy doesn't?" I ask.

Tessa looks at me with the savage calm only sisters and surgeons ever manage. "Then he becomes dangerous in a new way."

Callum crackles through the radio from the trailing car. "Drone feed lost. Storm too heavy. You're blind after the tree line."

Not blind. Just reduced to the oldest version of truth left in this story: women going back to the lake in bad weather because men with power mistook water for deletion. When the Stillwater gate finally looms out of the rain, it's already open. Owen wants an audience. Or confession. Or both.

Poppy's tracker pings from inside the house first, then from the dock, then freezes. Tessa is out of the SUV before the brakes fully lock. I follow because mothers, sisters, and guilty women all run the same when a child is at the end of the path.

The house is empty except for one lamp and the smell of whiskey. Out the back windows, through rain, the dock lights burn. Two silhouettes. one tall. one small.

"Still talking," Tessa says.

Of course he is.