Page 88 of Kept

Maverick steps forward, holding out his hand. “Mr. Jacobs. My name is Maverick Brooks, and I’m a private investigator.”

I fight to keep my composure as Roger Jacobs shakes his head. “If you’re selling, we already tried that route. They didn’t find anything.”

His wife places a hand on his arm. “Don’t you think we’ve tried everything?” she asks, her voice shaking. “We can’t afford any more. We’vetried. I’m sorry, but you’ve wasted your time.”

“We’re not selling,” Maverick says quietly, and they both silence. “I know what happened to Sherileen, Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs.”

Mr. Jacobs drops like a stone to his knees, his wife grabbing his shoulders as he curls himself inward. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

He looks up at us with wet eyes. “We know she is. We just want to know where she is, Mr. Brooks.”

His wife is crying, and I watch with a closed throat as Maverick kneels in front of Sherileen’s father. His words are firm, enough that they focus on him as he speaks.

He tells them that their daughter is dead. Their grief is a tangible, dark thing, hovering in the air around us. But there’s relief, too. Relief that the ax hanging over their head has finally dropped.

“Every day,” Mrs. Jacobs whispers shakily. “Every day I’d wake up, and it would take me a second to remember.”

She looks at me desperately, and I swallow. “I’m so sorry.”

She nods vacantly. “But we know now. I didn’t think we’d ever know.”

“She’s coming home?” her father says, and the tears on his face shine in the little light from the porch.

“Yes,” Maverick tells them. “Your daughter is coming home.”

I manage to hold on to my tears until we’re back in the car. And then Ryder lifts me, pulling me across the seat and drawing me into his chest as I choke on my tears and sob into his chest. Maverick makes a call from the front, talking into the earpiece about search areas.

“It’s so unfair,” I gasp. “They waited all that time.”

“The world isn’t fair,” Ryder says softly. “But they know now, Zella. They know what happened to their little girl. They’ll be able to bury her, visit her. It’s better than the agony of not knowing.”

I don’t think I could have understood that without seeing their reaction. The pain, the agony, but the relief too. Relief that so many questions left unanswered are now solved.

“Closure is the only thing we can give them,” Ryder whispers.

Closure.

“Not the only thing,” I whisper, and he makes a noise of acknowledgement.

It burns in my chest, the injustice that Sherileen will come home to her family in a box because of the actions of one man.

But there’s a dark satisfaction curling in my stomach, too, satisfaction that the man responsible is suffering for his evil. A poetic justice that he will die in agony, that he will writhe and scream for mercy that doesn’t come, just like they did.

I don’t know what happens after we die. But I hope that whatever the afterlife looks like, John Millers spends it in as much pain as he is experiencing right now, for eternity.

My heartbeat thuds loudly in my chest.

“Take me home, please,” I say into Ryder’s chest. “I’m ready to go home now.”

Maverick finishes up his call, and we pull away from the Jacobs’s home.

And behind us in the window, the little light is blown out.

32 – Enzo

I shove the last of John Millers into the furnace, latching the door shut with an irritated sigh.

I normally feel more settled after a table session. Morestable.

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