"By name," Damian repeated, reading the message over my shoulder for the second time in an hour, like rereading it might change what it said. "How would a man we've never met know to ask for you specifically?"
"I don't know." My hands had gone cold around the phone. "Marcus, is he stable? Can he even talk?"
Marcus's voice came through a moment later when Damian called him back, tired and clipped, the particular efficiency of a man running on adrenaline instead of sleep. "Stable, according to the nurse I spoke with. Someone ran him off the road outside the town he'd been living in under his assumed name. Hit and run, no witnesses, but he survived, conscious enough by the time paramedics arrived to give them one instruction before anything else. He said if anyone came asking questions, to call a woman named Ivy Bennett and no one else."
"That means he knew we were coming," I said slowly. "Before we even found his name."
"Or he's been waiting thirty years for someone to come asking," Marcus said. "And Ferris's videos, staggered the way they were, might have been designed to finally set that in motion. A dead man's switch doesn't just release information, Ivy. Sometimes it wakes people up."
Vivienne had gone very quiet in the corner of the room, arms still wrapped around herself, watching the conversation unfold with an expression somewhere between shock and something rawer, something that looked, unsettlingly, like grief for a version of herself she was only just beginning to understand.
"I want to go," I said. "Tonight. Before anyone else decides he's said too much already."
"Ivy." My mother's voice, weak but firm, cut through the room. "You can't drive two states in the dark alone, not with everything that's happened tonight."
"I'm not going alone." Damian was already reaching for his jacket, his expression settling into the same grim resolve I'd watched carry him through every crisis this family had survived so far. "Marcus, text me the hospital name and address. We'll leave within the hour."
"What about the boys?" I asked.
"Security stays with them," Damian said. "Patricia can be here within twenty minutes if we need her. I'm not leaving them unprotected, but I'm also not letting you walk into whatever this is without me."
Vivienne stepped forward then, her voice smaller than I'd ever heard it. "I want to come too."
Damian's eyes flicked to her, something guarded settling behind them that hadn't been there an hour ago, and I watched Vivienne see it, watched something in her face crumple slightly at the realization of exactly what had shifted between all of us in the last thirty minutes.
"I understand if you don't trust me right now," she said quietly. "I don't fully trust myself right now. But if this man remembers something about that night, something that involves me somehow, I'd rather hear it directly than have it filtered through anyone else's version first."
I looked at Damian, and something passed between us, wordless, the same calculation we'd made a dozen times over the last few months about who to trust and how much and when. Finally, he nodded, once, reluctant.
"You ride with us," he said. "Not alone. Not out of my sight."
Vivienne accepted the terms without argument, some part of her, I thought, almost relieved to have limits placed on her, as though trust without conditions had started to feel more frightening than suspicion ever could.
My mother caught my hand before we left, her grip weaker than it had been an hour ago, exhaustion finally winning the fight she'd been having with her own body all night.
"Be careful," she said. "Whatever he tells you, come back and tell me everything. I've spent thirty years not knowing. I don't think I can survive not knowing for one more night."
"I promise," I said, pressing a kiss to her forehead, and left her there under the steady tick of the monitor, a nurse already moving to check her vitals as we slipped out into the hallway.
The drive stretched long and dark, the three of us mostly silent, headlights sweeping across empty highway while Damian's hands stayed tight on the wheel and Vivienne sat curled against the passenger window, staring out at nothing, lost somewhere inside a memory she'd apparently carried her whole life without recognizing it for what it was.
"I keep trying to remember more," she said eventually, breaking the silence somewhere past the state line. "Trying to see if there's anything else back there, buried the way the groundskeeper was. But it's like reaching for a word right on the tip of your tongue. I can feel the shape of something, and every time I try to grab it, it slips away again."
"Maybe that's for the best," Damian said, not unkindly. "Some things stay buried because unburying them costs more than they're worth."
"Or maybe I've spent my whole life not knowing why I feel afraid of fire," Vivienne said quietly. "Why I've never once been able to sit near a fireplace without my whole body going tense. I always thought it was strange, a phobia with no source. Now I think I know exactly where it came from, and I don't know what to do with that."
Nobody had an answer for her, and the silence that followed carried a different weight than before, something closer to sympathy than suspicion, though I noticed neither of us fully released our guard either, the two things sitting uneasily together for the rest of the drive.
The hospital, when we finally reached it, was smaller than the one we'd left behind, a low brick building on the edge of a town that looked like it hadn't changed much in decades. A nurse at the front desk directed us toward a room on the third floor, her expression carefully neutral in the way of someone who'd already been told to expect us.
We found him propped up in bed, an IV taped to the back of one weathered hand, a bruise blooming dark along one side of his face, his eyes tracking toward the door the moment it opened like he'd been waiting, listening for footsteps this exact shape.
"You're her," he said, his voice rough, thin with age and pain. "You have her eyes. Elena's eyes."
"You knew my mother," I said, stepping closer.
"I knew both your parents," he said, his gaze shifting past me, settling on Vivienne with an expression that made my stomach drop before he'd said another word, something between recognition and sorrow crossing his weathered face. "And I know her too. I've known her since she was small enough to fit in my arms, crying in the dark while her father screamed at people I was too afraid to name."
Vivienne went very still beside me.
"I have something for you," the old man said, his hand trembling as he reached toward the drawer of the bedside table. "David gave it to me years ago, told me to keep it safe until someone finally came asking the right questions." His fingers closed around a small, worn envelope, yellowed with age. "He said whoever came for this would need to know the whole truth before they decided who to trust next.”