The federal building lobby had a particular kind of silent marble floors, air that smelled of recycled importance, and the quiet of people who had learned to manage their expressions. Daren walked through it with Elara at his side, and felt every pair of eyes register his face before sliding away.His name was in every headline. They all knew who he was.The prosecutor's name was Celia Hartwood, fifties, grey-suited, with eyes that moved the way Elara's did: cataloguing. She stood when they entered the conference room and shook hands without preamble."Mr. Cole." A pause that could have meant anything. "You look considerably more alive than your last press photograph suggested.""I was motivated." He took the seat across from her. Elara sat beside him. There was a legal pad in front of Hartwood and a manila folder thick enough to be deliberate."We've reviewed the package." Hartwood opened the folder. "I'll be direct. The federal intake team considers this the most complete unsolicite

Victor Stahl called Serena eight times between eight and noon. She answered none of them.Daren knew this because the recording captured the phone buzzing against the table for the third time as she described the charity board meeting where Rae had first introduced himself, and she had simply turned the screen face-down and continued speaking. It was the most revealing thing she did in forty-one minutes: not the content of her words, but the deliberate choice to ignore her father's call while she was giving those words to the man he had most tried to destroy.He sent the recording to Elara at eleven-thirty with a message that contained three words: Rae approached Serena.Elara's response took four minutes long enough for her to have listened to at least part of it.Get this to Hartwood today. Before Rae's team does anything else.He was already in a taxi.Hartwood's assistant tried to schedule him for the following week.He said, "Tell her Callum Rae's team approached a witness to sup

The regulatory authority hearing was rescheduled under federal supervision for a Thursday that arrived with low clouds and the kind of grey light that made everything look like a document. Daren drove himself. Noah had offered. Elara had been at his side since six a.m., going through the final evidence index with the focus of someone defusing something."Hargrove's challenge was formally withdrawn at nine last night," she said, not looking up from the tablet. "His solicitor cited 'changed evidentiary landscape.' Which is legal language for 'there is nothing left to argue.'""And Welles?""Suspended pending federal review. He's cooperating or claiming to. His lawyer is building a duress case." She set the tablet down. "It won't hold. The 2021 Fenwick closure was his signature and his alone."Daren looked at the road. The city moved past the window buildings he had assessed and constructed and believed in, streets he had walked as a different man, a man who had trusted the surfaces of t

She called him three weeks after the hearing. Not with a letter this time directly, on his actual number, which she had always had because there are some numbers you don't delete even when you are trying to.He answered."I'm not calling to … " She stopped. Reorganised. "I wanted you to know that I've accepted a position in Edinburgh. A communications directorate with a climate policy NGO. I'm leaving in six weeks."He said nothing for a moment. Outside the site office window, the crew was running the last afternoon check before the weekend."Good," he said. He meant it.A small silence."Daren." And then: "I'm sorry. I know it doesn't help the thing it needs to help. I know saying it two years later doesn't change what the two years cost." Her voice was steady but very careful, the voice of a woman who had prepared these sentences but not their delivery. "I think I knew something was wrong long before the collapse. Not what Marco had done I genuinely didn't know the specifics. But I

The day Daren Cole walked back into the city as himself, not as David Mercer, not as an anonymous source, not as a ghost with a hard drive was not the day of the hearing. It was not the day of Rae's arrest. It was not the day the press ran his name above the fold or the day the federal prosecutor confirmed six of seven counts.It was a Thursday in November, ordinary and cold, when he put on a hard hat and walked the perimeter of the Aldersgate public infrastructure project Meridian Structural's largest active contract, a pedestrian bridge linking the south district to the financial corridor, commissioned by the city authority in the first genuine public contract they had awarded since the inquiry had concluded.The bridge would take fourteen months. The foundation work alone was three months of unrushed, honest engineering. He had walked every metre of the ground survey himself. The soil reports were clean. The structural tolerance was a model for what the Caldwell reports should have