9 - The Shape of His Absence

Weekend mornings had a way of becoming unbearable long before noon.

During the week, there was at least some kind of structure holding me together, even if it was only the rush of Sullivan's and the simple fact that people expected me to be somewhere at a certain time. The café gave shape to my mornings. It demanded things from me, focus, movement, small talk, routine, and in return it left very little room for the kind of thinking that had begun to consume me the moment I was left alone. But Saturdays were different. Saturdays stretched too far in every direction, opening up into hours I didn't know how to fill, leaving me with nothing but myself, the silence in my apartment, and the increasingly unsettling feeling that the things I had begun to uncover were waiting patiently for me to stop avoiding them.

That morning, I had made coffee simply because it was something to do. I carried the mug to the couch, tucked my legs beneath me, and turned on the television in the vague hope that meaningless noise might be enough to drown out everything else. Some show I had no real interest in what played across the screen, its characters speaking too brightly, laughing too easily, moving through neatly packaged problems that would no doubt resolve themselves before the credits rolled. I watched without absorbing any of it. My eyes stayed fixed on the shifting light of the screen, but my mind was nowhere near it.

The apartment felt too still.

It wasn't only the quiet that got to me, though that was part of it. It was the way the stillness seemed to settle into everything, pressing itself into the walls, into the corners of the room, into the spaces between my thoughts until I could feel it physically. Compared to the mornings at the café, with their clatter of cups, their hiss of steam, the constant movement of people who needed things from me, this kind of silence felt unnatural, almost accusatory.

I had tried, in my own half-hearted way, to keep myself busy. I had wiped down the kitchen counters even though they didn't need it, unpacked a few more things I had no immediate use for, reorganized the bathroom cabinet in a way that changed absolutely nothing. But none of it had lasted. My attention kept drifting back to the same place, to the same dark object sitting exactly where I had left it.

The metal box.

It didn't move. It didn't need to. Its presence was enough.

I kept trying to preserve the version of my family that I knew, the one that still felt safe in my memory, the one untouched by half-hidden investigations and unfinished truths. I wanted to keep them there, in the shape I remembered them, in the ordinary softness of soup in the fridge and notes on the counter and my brother calling out to me when he came home at the end of the day. But the box kept insisting there was more, and somehow I already knew that not looking wouldn't protect me from whatever was inside it. It would only delay it.

I stared at it for a long time before finally giving in, drawing a slow breath that did nothing to calm me as I leaned forward and pulled it toward me.

Maybe this time I would find something kind.

Maybe this time I would get a version of them that felt more familiar than frightening.

I lifted the lid carefully, as though there were something fragile inside that might break under sudden movement, and reached in with fingers that already felt tense. The first note I pulled free was folded neatly, and the moment I saw my mother's handwriting, something in my chest tightened with a tenderness so immediate it almost hurt.

I unfolded it slowly.

Katherine,

I went into your room earlier and found two mugs, a bowl, and what I'm fairly certain used to be a piece of toast sitting on your desk. I'm choosing not to ask how long it's been there.

You're lucky I love you.

There's soup in the fridge, properly made, not the kind you pretend counts as a meal. Please eat something warm tonight. You have a habit of skipping meals when your head is somewhere else, and I can always tell when it is.

Your father and I have both been working later than usual this week. You've probably noticed. It's one of those cases that seems simple at first and then refuses to stay that way the longer you look at it.

Nothing unusual, technically.

Just… complicated.

We keep telling each other it's nearly finished, but somehow there's always something else that needs reviewing, something that doesn't quite line up the way it should. Your dad says I'm overthinking it. I think he just doesn't like when I'm right.

You don't need to worry about any of that. It's work, and work has a way of following you home if you let it, so we're trying not to.

We'll be done with it soon.

Come downstairs when you're done hiding. We can watch something terrible and pretend we're not both avoiding emails.

Love you, Mum

By the time I reached the end, the paper had drifted closer to my chest without me noticing, as though some instinctive part of me still believed that if I held it tightly enough, something of her might come back through it. Of course nothing did, not really. I hadn't felt my mother's warmth in years, hadn't heard her voice except in the occasional half-memory that came to me at night when I was too tired to keep my mind guarded.

And yet, somehow, her words still carried something of her.

They grounded me in a way very little else could, wrapping around the jaggedness inside me with the easy familiarity only she had ever possessed. Her voice lived in the small details, in the teasing, in the way she always knew when I hadn't eaten properly, in the gentle way she made even criticism feel like care. Reading it felt like sitting in the presence of a version of her I had been trying desperately not to lose.

I had known they worked late. I had known it even as a child, though I had accepted it in the thoughtless way children accept most things about the adults around them. At twelve, their work had belonged to a distant world that had nothing to do with me, something that existed behind office doors and phone calls and the occasional sigh at the dinner table. I hadn't questioned it because I had never needed to.

Now I wasn't so sure I had ever really known anything at all.

Before I could stop myself, my hand was already moving back toward the box, drawn by that dangerous, aching mix of wanting comfort and needing answers. The next letter I unfolded was immediately familiar in a different way. Christian's handwriting was never as careful as Mum's; there was always something restless in it, something slightly hurried, even when he was trying to be deliberate.

I knew, before I even read the first line, that this one would leave me less steady than the last.

I unfolded the page fully and began to read.

Kat,

I'm going to keep this simple, because if I try to explain everything the way I want to, I'll end up saying too much.

There was a case Mum and Dad worked on together that never sat right with me.

They both treated it differently than anything else. Usually, they were aligned on things, same opinions, same conclusions, same way of handling it. But this one… it didn't quite match up.

They agreed on the outcome. But not on what it meant.

It was something to do with infrastructure, coastal project, I think. One of those reviews they were brought in for after things had already started going wrong.

On paper, it closed cleanly. Signed off. No further action required.

But that's the thing, it only looked clean.

I remember hearing them argue about it once. Not loudly, not in a way they thought anyone would notice, but enough. Mum kept saying something didn't add up, that there were gaps they weren't being given access to. Dad said it wasn't their job to chase every loose end.

They stopped talking about it after that. At least in front of me. But it didn't go away.

You could feel it, even if you didn't understand it at the time.

I've tried to find more on it since, but it's buried under layers of reports and language that doesn't actually say anything. The kind of thing that looks complete until you start asking the wrong questions.

I don't know exactly what they were pulled into, but I know it was bigger than what they let on.

And I know they didn't walk away from it the same way they did everything else.

If you start connecting things, if something feels like it's leading somewhere, just be careful.

You don't need to understand all of it.

And not everything that looks finished actually is.

- Chris

When I reached the end of the letter, I didn't lower it immediately. I just sat there with it in my hands, my gaze fixed somewhere beyond the page while the words continued moving through me long after I had stopped reading them. It wasn't that I was going over them again deliberately; they simply refused to leave. They surfaced and settled and returned, each time carrying a little more weight than they had the last.

Mum kept saying something didn't add up.

That line stayed with me most of all. It lodged itself somewhere deep, not because it was dramatic, but because it wasn't. It felt too ordinary to be meaningless, too specific to be ignored. It sounded like the kind of sentence you remembered only when it turned out to matter.

Slowly, I lowered the letter and placed it beside my mother's on the coffee table, but my hand lingered there for a moment, brushing over the paper as if part of me still wasn't ready to let go of it.

In front of me, my notebook lay open, already crowded with words that had seemed disconnected when I first wrote them down, and yet no longer felt that way now. They weren't answers, not yet, but they were something. Pieces. Fragments of a shape I still couldn't fully see.

Helix Infrastructure Group.Compliance review.Coastal project.

I reached for my pen and added another name beneath them, pressing harder than I intended.

Taylor Advisory & Compliance.

Seeing that company name on the page did something to me that I hadn't expected. It made the whole thing harder to keep at a distance. It wasn't just what my parents did anymore, not just a vague memory of their working late or disappearing into offices with closed doors. It was real enough to have a name, real enough to exist in places I could look up and find.

My parents.

The words felt strange sitting beside the others, too personal against the cold shape of company names and investigations.

For a long moment, I simply stared at the page, waiting for something inside me to settle into clarity. When it didn't, another name rose quietly to the surface of my mind, something I had seen before and almost dismissed.

Lattice Holdings LLC.

I remembered the name from the article. It had been buried in the kind of sentence most people skim past, forgettable unless you had a reason not to forget it. Now, suddenly, it felt far from forgettable.

I wrote that down too.

Then I reached for my laptop.

Even before I opened it, I could feel the weight of what I was doing, the quiet pull of the unknown sitting just beneath my skin. Part of me already knew I might find something I wasn't ready for. Still, I opened it anyway, letting the pale light of the screen spill into the room.

For a moment, my fingers hovered over the keyboard.

Then I typed.

Lattice Holdings LLC

The search results were sparse in a way that made me uneasy almost immediately. Not empty. Just empty enough. There were filings, registrations, documents that confirmed the company existed without offering anything clear about what it actually was. It felt less like a business and more like a paper trail wearing the shape of one.

I clicked on one of the PDFs and waited while it opened, filling the screen with dense blocks of formal text. At first glance, it looked complete. Official. Structured. The kind of document written to appear final.

But the more I looked at it, the more hollow it felt.

I forced myself to slow down, to actually read what was there rather than skim for recognizable words.

Ownership structures. Contract allocations. Regional oversight.

The language was so polished it bordered on meaningless, each section sounding as though it explained something while somehow managing not to.

I kept scrolling.

And then my eyes stopped.

There was a section listing external firms, oversight partners, independent review providers, and I read through the names one by one, not expecting anything, not prepared for the strange, immediate stillness that settled over me when I saw it.

Taylor Advisory & Compliance — External Compliance Review Partner.

I read the line once. Then again.

And then once more, slower still, as though the words might rearrange themselves if I gave them enough time.

My parents' company.

Not implied. Not suggested. Not something I had pieced together from vague clues and instinct.

Listed.

Right there in front of me.

Something shifted inside my chest, slowly and deeply, the kind of shift that doesn't feel dramatic in the moment but changes the ground beneath you all the same. My fingers tightened against the edge of the laptop as if I needed something solid to keep me in place.

This wasn't speculation anymore.

It wasn't memory, or grief, or me trying to force unrelated things together because I wanted them to mean something.

It was real.

I scrolled further.

And then I found the line that connected everything I had been trying not to connect.

Project: Maine Coastal Infrastructure Initiative

The words settled into me with a strange, quiet finality.

The article. The bridge collapse. The compliance review.

It all aligned.

Not neatly. Not perfectly. But enough.

Enough to make it impossible to ignore.

I leaned back, though the motion felt unsteady, one hand pressing instinctively against my chest as if I could physically steady the feeling building there.

"This doesn't…" I started, but the sentence never became anything more, because the truth was I didn't know how to finish it.

The problem wasn't that the pieces didn't fit. The problem was that they did.

And the meaning of that was still just beyond my reach.

Mum kept saying something didn't add up.

It didn't close properly.

The words overlapped now, no longer separate thoughts but part of the same thing, the same thread I had been circling without realizing how close I already was to it. If they had worked on this, if they had been involved directly, officially, if they had seen something that unsettled them enough to carry it home, then what had gone wrong? What had they uncovered? What had they been forced to leave unfinished?

I didn't have answers.

Only the sharp, pressing weight of questions I could no longer pretend weren't there.

I pushed the laptop slightly away, not closing it, just needing distance from the screen, from the proof of it, from the reality of seeing my parents' names woven into something like this.

But the distance didn't help.

The apartment suddenly felt smaller than it had before, the silence heavier, the walls somehow closer. I stood too quickly, the motion unsteady, and dragged a hand through my hair as I tried to catch my breath, to stop my thoughts from spiraling into something I couldn't contain.

"My parents…" I whispered, but the words died there, unfinished.

Because I didn't know how to follow them.

The people I remembered the ones who left soup in the fridge, who argued over television shows and signed notes with love, didn't fit with this. Not with investigations. Not with shell companies. Not with something that had led to a bridge collapse in Maine and a paper trail hidden behind Lattice Holdings LLC.

My gaze lifted to the metal box again. There were more letters inside it.

Chapter 9 - 9