Page 18 of The Angel Maker

“Voilà,” her father said quietly.

Katie looked away from the window and toward her mother.

She was standing by the doorway, one hand cupped under her other elbow, her gaze moving over the sight before her. It was hard to work out what she was thinking.

Inside, the unit was small, but her father had worked hard to maximize the available space. There were the racks and shelves around the walls, and against the window, and the effect of the colors was even more impressive in the shop. Outside, Katie had felt like she was observing a rainbow; in there, it was more like she was standing inside one. To her right was a counter with an old cash register and thin sheets of packing paper. Behind that, a sink unit and counter, the latter covered with pots and pans she recognized from the now-empty garage back home. They looked battered and out of place, but it was equipment that had served her father well over the years.

She looked at him. He had a strange expression on his face, as though he wanted to be proud but wasn’t quite sure if he was allowed to be.

“What do you think?” he asked them.

“It’s amazing,” Katie said.

“Really?” He beamed at her for a moment—but then corrected himself. “I know it needs a lot of work. But it’s a start.”

Chris was looking around with the same sense of wonder he’d had outside the role-playing game shop. It would occur to Katie years later that he often approached the world that way—that it was as much a part of him as the vulnerability. It was another thing Michael Hyde would take from him.

“Do people really buythis manycandles?” Chris said.

“Not all at once,” her mother told him.

She had been silent until then, still hugging herself and looking around, as though she wasn’t sure what to make of what she was seeing. But then she stepped over to her husband, put her arms around him, and hugged him tightly. After a moment’s hesitation, he embraced her back. Even though Katie didn’t fully understand everything that had gone on between them, she felt it in the air anyway: some kind of tension dissipating.

“It’s perfect,” her mother said.

“No, it needs a lot of work.”

She rubbed his back.

“Not all at once,” she repeated quietly.

As well as a phone number for Chris, Katie’s mother had an address for him. He had even left her a spare key. But her mother no longer drove, and she wanted Katie to see if he was all right. The idea of doing so filled her with dread. Despite her mother’s assurances he was no longer using, her mind immediately conjured up an image of Chris lying dead in his apartment, and she couldn’t imagine how it would feel to find him like that. And even if he was fine, what would it be like to see him again after all this time?

“If you’re that worried about him,” Katie said, “we should call the police.”

Her mother shook her head.

“He would never want the police involved.”

Once again, her mother was gracious enough not to mention what had happened the last time Katie had seen Chris.

But it hung in the air anyway.

And so, back in the car, Katie texted Sam to let him know she was going to be a little longer than she’d expected, and then drove south into the whorl of the highway that circled the city center. The streetlights filled the car with alternating waves of amber and shadow, and they washed over her in time with the anxiety that was throbbing inside her. Along with the familiar feeling that what she wanted was always less important than her brother.

Of always being second best.

The GPS took her past the city’s floodlit prison, which sat on the crest of a hill like a castle, and then along streets lined with flat, hard-edged houses. A single main road ran through the village in which Chris had made his home. She drove past shuttered convenience stores and charity shops, interspersed with the bright windows of intermittent fast-food restaurants. She caught sight of a few shapes huddled in the doorways, and a couplesitting hunched together in the shadows of a bus shelter, but the street was otherwise almost eerily deserted.

She signaled and pulled in.

At first glance, the address Chris had given her mother looked like a bust. Number fifty-three was a real estate agent, while the windows of number fifty-five beside it were filled with rolls of carpet and squares of dull-colored fabric. Both were closed. She was beginning to think her brother must have lied once again, but then she noticed an unmarked door between the two businesses.

She leaned forward and peered up through the windshield. There was a second story above the fabric shop, almost invisible against the night sky. Its windows were dark.

Okay, then.

Katie checked her cell phone.

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