“Yes.”
Diane drew a sharp breath. My father cut her off before she could speak.
“What did he give you?” he asked.
“Something that wasn’t meant for you.”
He took a slow step toward me. “Listen. Whatever you think this is, it’s not worth making things difficult. We can handle this properly.”
That word again. I glanced around the room, at the open drawers, the scattered papers. “I think you already tried that,” I said.
Something shifted in his eyes. Not guilt. Something more pragmatic than guilt.
“You don’t understand what you’re dealing with,” he said.
I thought about the note in my pocket, about the way the admiral had looked at me across that desk, about the careful deliberate weight of three words written in a dead man’s handwriting. Don’t let them take it.
“Neither do you,” I said.
And for the first time that night, my father had no answer for me.
I left without explaining myself further. I grabbed my bag, took one last look at the cabin, and walked back out into the cold mountain air. No headlights followed me down the road. But the feeling that I was being watched didn’t leave for a long time.
