Chapter 18: The Case Lid

Gideon's POV

I left Lydia asleep at six, with a note on the pillow and her hand curled where mine had been.

The note said I would be back with breakfast.

That was true, and it was not the whole of it.

Brandon Keats had texted me at four in the morning, from a number I didn't know.

She slapped me, he wrote. She's at the radio station until nine. The papers are in the lid of her keyboard case. I can't carry it and watch the door.

I should have woken Lydia and shown her.

I stood in the doorway of my own bedroom and looked at her sleeping, one arm over her stomach, and I knew she would insist on coming.

She was eight weeks along and would not sit in a truck outside her cousin's house.

So I went alone.

Piper rented a white house in Berry Hill with a lawn so short it looked mown with scissors.

Brandon opened the back door before I knocked.

The red mark was a bruise now, plum-colored, high on his cheekbone.

"She moved me into the spare room in August," he said. "So she could keep an eye on me. I have a key."

"Show me the case."

It was in the front room beside a keyboard stand, black and scuffed, with stickers on the lid from towns I'd played myself.

Brandon knelt and thumbed the latch.

"Her birthday," he said. "She never changes it."

Inside the lid, behind a flap of foam, was a manila folder an inch thick.

He lifted it out and held it against his chest.

For a second neither of us moved, and I noticed his hands were steady for the first time since I'd met him.

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