The name hit Vivien like a physical blow. Her hand found the strap of her bag and gripped it as though she needed something solid to hold on to. Miles frowned, searching his memory for the name and coming up empty, too young to have known the story the way Vivien did.
To Vivien, the name Elias Ward belonged to a ghost, a man who had vanished from every record 20 years earlier, whose disappearance had been quietly buried beneath press releases and shareholder statements until the world simply forgot to ask questions about him. Nobody knew if he was alive. Nobody had known for two decades.
She asked carefully how Nolan knew that name and whether the man was still living. Nolan told her only that he was and that he intended to see him that same day in the town of Black Ridge where the man had apparently spent the last 20 years of his life in quiet obscurity. Vivien's mind raced through options with the speed of someone accustomed to solving problems in seconds rather than hours. She turned to Miles and instructed him to charter a helicopter, something faster than the drive, something that could get her to the mountains before nightfall. But Nolan shook his head.
He explained without elaboration that he intended to take the bus the way he always had, the way that felt right for a journey this important. Vivien stared at him as though he had suggested walking there on foot.
Against every instinct her assistant tried to talk her out of, Vivien decided she would go with him. Miles objected immediately, listing the meetings she would miss, the deals that would stall, the shareholders who would ask uncomfortable questions about her sudden disappearance. Vivien listened to none of it. She had spent 20 years wondering about a name she had been forbidden to ask about. And now that name had walked up to her in an airport terminal, wearing an old brown coat and carrying a leather case that looked unsettlingly like one she remembered from a photograph she had seen only once long ago in her father's private study.
She could not look away from that case. There was something about its shape, its worn brass clasp, the way the leather had cracked along the same creases that made her certain she had seen it before. Though she could not place exactly where or when, it sat beside Nolan now, patient and unremarkable to anyone who had not spent 20 years searching for pieces of a story. Nobody would explain to her.
The bus terminal outside the airport smelled of diesel and rain, and the vehicle itself groaned with the particular exhaustion of long-distance travel, but Vivien climbed aboard without complaint, settling into a seat beside a man she had known for less than an hour. For the first several miles, neither of them spoke, the silence filled only by the hum of tires against wet asphalt, and the occasional announcement crackling through a speaker somewhere near the front. It was Vivien who finally broke the quiet, asking Nolan questions in the careful, probing way, she interrogated business partners before signing contracts. He answered some of them honestly and deflected others with the calm patience of a man who had spent years learning which doors were worth opening and which were better left closed.
He told her he had known Elias many years earlier, when Nolan was young and just beginning his career, and that Elias had done something for him he could never properly repay. When Vivien pressed for details, Nolan only said that he owed the man a promise and that some promises were not meant to be explained before they were fulfilled. Vivien found herself against her nature, willing to wait, she watched the mountains rise slowly on the horizon.