The envelope from the Florida State Investigations Bureau sat on my kitchen counter for two days before I opened it, because I'd learned that agency updates came in two flavors, nothing new or something I'd have to carry around for a while, and I wasn't ready to find out which this was.
When I finally read it, it was neither. More than one hundred fifteen interviews. Tens of thousands of documents and pieces of evidence reviewed. An active investigation, the letter said, as if the word active could still mean anything after twenty years. No name. No answer. Just the weight of all that work laid out in a paragraph, proof that people were still trying and proof that trying hadn't been enough.
I brought it to the shop because I didn't want to be alone with it, and because Wade had asked, the way he always did on the anniversary, whether there was anything new. I handed him the letter instead of answering. He read it standing at the workbench, lips moving slightly the way they did when a number mattered to him.
"That's a lot of nothing," he said, not unkindly, setting it down next to a box of hinge pins. "Twenty years, Maren. Fifty interviews, five hundred, it doesn't move unless somebody gives them something to move on."
I told him I knew that better than he did. He held up a hand, not arguing, and said he had something to show me instead, something that might finally give the case the push a government letter couldn't. He pulled up a mockup on his phone, a glossy flyer with Cypress Lantern Hospitality's old logo faded in one corner, Ellis's photo beside a second image, a man's posture caught from behind in grainy footage I hadn't looked at in years.
"Owen Pell," Wade said. "Same build, same way of carrying his shoulders. I pulled the old surveillance stills and set them side by side. Look at the stance, Maren. I've looked at a hundred men over the years and none of them stood like that except him."
I asked what else he had. He said the stance was enough to start a conversation, that Owen had worked near that complex the week Ellis disappeared, that a public campaign, posters, a social push timed to the anniversary, could finally shake something loose after two decades of institutional caution.
Then he told me the rest. He wanted to buy out my half of Dovell Corliss Door Service, a number that would clear every debt the company had quietly accumulated during the years I'd spent chasing leads instead of chasing invoices, enough left over that I could stop taking jobs I was too tired to finish. The sale was conditional, he said, on my public endorsement of the campaign launching alongside it.
I looked at the two photographs again, the real one of my brother and the blurred one of a stranger, and felt something in me want to say yes before I'd thought it through, because yes meant money and rest and maybe, finally, movement. "Show me your evidence," I said instead. "Not a stance. Evidence."
Wade's jaw tightened. "The stance is the evidence. That's how these things start, Maren. Somebody notices, somebody comes forward." I told him noticing wasn't knowing, that I'd spent sixteen years teaching myself the difference the hard way, and that I wasn't going to put my name under a stranger's face because it would pay off a loan.
He didn't answer right away. He just looked at me like I'd turned down the only chance either of us had left, and for the first time in twenty years of partnership, I watched him decide I wasn't on his side anymore.