Chapter 12: Mara Looks Up the Three Names

The names were written on a single sheet of A4 in her own handwriting, black ink, capital letters with the precision she'd used on case markers when the room was crowded and the light was poor and she needed to see across the table without moving. She'd written them six weeks ago and turned the paper face-down on the counter and not turned it over since.

She turned it over now.

CALLUM HAD SAID THE NAMES IN THE VOICEMAIL. She had heard them once and then she had heard them every night since in the specific way that certain sounds embed themselves below the processing layer — the way a word heard through sleep arrives already translated, already known. She had written them down in the first clean hour after the February move, when the flat still smelled like strangers and the forensic kit was the only thing she'd unpacked, and then she had turned the paper over and placed the cult's documents on top of it and begun her color-coded annotation system and not thought about it.