Penelope reached across and placed her hand briefly over her father's, the gesture quiet and deliberate, the kind of touch that is meant to slow someone down rather than comfort them."You need to calm down," she said, her voice steady and measured, carrying the particular authority of someone who is genuinely less frightened than the person they are speaking to. "It has not gotten to that point yet. Not yet. And I genuinely believe that before this day is fully over, we are going to have information, real information, that moves this situation forward." She held his gaze. "Liam is going to be fine. I am sure of it. You have nothing to worry about on that front."Nathaniel looked at her for a moment, something shifting in his expression between gratitude for her composure and frustration that she seemed to possess a certainty he could not locate in himself."Then what is making you angry?" he asked. "Because I can see it. You are not just worried. You are pissed. You are disgusted abo

Nathaniel looked at her."You do not need to exhaust yourself over this," she said. "I will go to the hospital myself. I will handle it directly."Before she could finish the thought, Marcus's voice came back through the phone, quicker than before, a slight shift in its texture that was almost imperceptible but not quite."There is no need for that, Penelope," he said.But Nathaniel was no longer listening to his son's objections.He had pressed the phone more firmly against his ear, and something in his posture had changed, something in the set of his shoulders that suggested the conversation had just delivered something unexpected."I was not sitting idle before you called," Marcus continued, his voice regaining its composure. "I have been pushing on this from my end. The lawyers I contacted before this call gave me a response just shortly before you rang, actually a reasonable one. I am working on getting the full footage released through the proper legal channels, and I have been

There was a moment of quiet on the other end.And then Liam spoke, and when he did, his voice carried something that Penelope did not immediately know how to categorize. It was not the voice of a man calling from a police cell. It was not the strained, careful voice of someone managing fear or exhaustion or the particular kind of psychological erosion that comes from hours of interrogation in a small room. It was relaxed. Unhurried. Entirely composed."You have nothing to worry about," he said simply. "But I do want to say thank you, genuinely, for the lawyers your father sent. That means a lot to me. However." A brief pause. "They will not be needed."Penelope blinked."What?""I have not seen them yet," Liam continued, the same even tone, the same unhurried delivery. "But I wanted to call, first of all, to apologize for not coming back yesterday. That was remiss of me and I should have called sooner. I was released yesterday evening, actually. Quite early in the evening. I had every

The question hung in the air between them, patient and immovable, the way only a father's question can hang, carrying within it not just the request for information but the full accumulated weight of years of attention, of watching, of knowing someone from the very first moment of their existence and understanding, on some cellular level, when they are holding something back.Penelope looked at her father.And in the space of the few seconds that followed, she ran through the full calculation with the speed and precision of someone who has been quietly preparing for this exact moment without fully admitting to herself that it was coming.She thought about what she knew.She thought about the specific nature of what she knew, the texture of it, the implications of it, the way certain information, once spoken aloud in the wrong room to the wrong person at the wrong time, becomes impossible to contain. She thought about her father, about his particular brand of intelligence, the way he p

Nathaniel looked at him for a moment."There is no need," he said quietly.Marcus blinked. A single, fractional disruption in his composure, gone almost before it arrived."I am sorry?""The footage," Nathaniel said. "There is no need to pursue it any further. The situation has changed."Marcus stood very still."Changed how?" he said, and his voice carried exactly the right amount of genuine curiosity, exactly the right balance between confusion and attentiveness."Liam has been released," Nathaniel said simply, watching his son's face as he delivered the information.What happened next was interesting.Marcus was good. He had always been good at controlling his expressions, at managing the presentation of his inner life to the people around him, and in most circumstances, in the vast majority of situations he had encountered over the course of his life, that skill served him extremely well.But this was not most circumstances.The information that Liam had been released, not this mo