Chapter 9: The Doctrine of Blood

He gave himself one day.

He spent most of it at Samir’s, sitting at the kitchen table with his phone and the photographs he’d taken in the basement, going through them methodically, making notes in a composition notebook he’d bought at the gas station down the street. His school notebooks felt wrong for this. He organized what he knew: the binders, the vote, the seven and the three, his name in the noncompliance folder eleven months before his birthday, his mother’s written objection, the index card with the farm address and the circled date.

He also spent part of it just staring at nothing. He tried not to do too much of that, but he couldn’t fully stop.

Samir came home from school, made food, and didn’t push. That was the thing about Samir—he had a natural sense of when a person needed to be talked at and when they needed to be left alone inside whatever they were carrying. He consistently chose correctly without seeming to notice he was choosing anything at all. He just lived alongside Eli’s silence the way you live alongside a radio playing in another room, acknowledging it was there without demanding it change.

“I’m going tomorrow,” Eli said that evening, over soup that came from a can but tasted fine.

“I know,” Samir said.

“I want you to drive me. You don’t have to come in. I’d actually rather you didn’t—I think it goes better if it’s just me.” He turned his spoon in the bowl. “But I want somebody to know where I am and when I went in and when I’m supposed to come back out.”

“Agreed,” Samir said. “I’ll stay with the car. You’ve got an hour, you text me every fifteen if you can, and if I don’t hear from you at the hour mark I start calling people.”

“Dana Hart first,” Eli said.

“Dana Hart first,” Samir confirmed, like they were scheduling something ordinary.

They ate for a while in the particular comfortable quiet of two people who’ve been through enough together that they don’t need to fill the air.

“Do you think she’ll actually talk to you?” Samir said.

“Yeah,” Eli said. “Claire said she would.” He considered that. “And I think—I think she wants to. I think part of what this has been missing, from her side, is a chance to explain it to someone who doesn’t already believe it. I think she’s been waiting a long time for someone to ask.”

Samir looked at him with the careful, measuring expression he used when he was deciding whether something was smart or its opposite.

“Just be careful,” he said, “that explaining isn’t the same thing as convincing.”

“I know.”

“I’m saying it anyway.”

“I know,” Eli said again, and meant: I heard you. I’m not going because I expect to be persuaded. I’m going because I need to see the thing that made my family what they are, standing in front of me, looking me in the eye.

He didn’t say that. Samir knew it anyway. They finished the soup.

The Voss farm was about nineteen miles east on the state highway, then a left onto a county road that didn’t have a name on the maps app, just a designation, and then another mile or so on gravel. The land out there was flat in the way that most of this part of the state was flat—not dramatically, just quietly, with a permanence that had nothing to do with anyone living on it. The fields had been harvested and were bare now, the rows of old corn stubble running in precise lines that the November light made look almost decorative, if you were in the mood to see them that way. Eli wasn’t.

The farmhouse sat at the end of a long gravel drive, flanked on the left by a windbreak of old elms—half of them dead but still standing, holding their shape out of habit. The house itself was two stories, white paint gone gray around the edges, with a covered porch running the width of the front. Two outbuildings stood behind it: a barn and a smaller structure of concrete block that didn’t announce its purpose. Around it all, the land just went on—flat, cleared, and open to the sky in every direction. No neighboring house was visible from the drive. The nearest town was eleven miles behind them.

Samir stopped at the end of the drive and looked at the place.

“Rural and isolated,” he said, not quite to Eli, not quite to himself. “Great.”

“Stay on the road,” Eli said. “You’ll have signal here, I checked.” He looked at the house. No visible movement, but smoke rose from the chimney on the right side, so someone was home. “One hour. Fifteen-minute texts.”

He got out of the car.

The gravel was loud under his boots. The wind came across the empty field from the north and cut through his jacket in a way that made him wish he’d worn a heavier one. He walked toward the porch with his hands in his pockets and tried to think of nothing in particular, because thinking in particular had not been serving him this morning—just making him tight in the shoulders and tight behind the eyes. He tried to breathe like a person who was not afraid. Which he was, but less than he’d expected.

He’d been to this farm once, he thought, when he was maybe five or six—a summer gathering, the kind of extended family thing that happened every few years when the Calders and Vosses converged. He had a vague memory of running in grass behind the barn with cousins he didn’t know well, catching fireflies in a jar. He hadn’t known, at five or six, that the farm was anything other than a farm.

He stepped up onto the porch and knocked.

Lydia opened the door before the second knock.

She was older than he remembered — he’d last seen her at a holiday gathering when he was maybe fifteen, and she’d been a tall, composed woman in her fifties with short hair and a deliberate way of moving that made her seem like she was always exactly where she intended to be. She looked like that still, but more settled into it somehow, the way certain people grow more themselves as they age rather than less. She wore a dark wool sweater and dark pants, and she looked at him with an expression he could only describe as quiet satisfaction, like someone whose prediction had come true.

“Elias,” she said. Not with surprise.

“Lydia,” he said, and felt a small, strange relief at using her name rather than Aunt Lydia, which was how he’d addressed her his whole life. It was a small thing but it felt like the only accurate thing.

She glanced past him briefly — at the car at the end of the drive, at Samir visible through the windshield — and then back at him. She nodded once, a small acknowledgment of a precaution she apparently found reasonable.

“Come in,” she said, and held the door open.

The kitchen was warm and smelled like coffee and something baking, a sweetness he couldn’t identify. It was a farmhouse kitchen — wide, practical, the floor worn linoleum, the counters clear, a long wooden table down the center surrounded by mismatched chairs that looked like they’d accumulated over decades from different houses. A window over the sink looked out on the back property, the bare fields, the concrete outbuilding behind the barn.