The texter stayed silent for three days. I checked my phone more than I wanted to admit, at stoplights, in meetings, in the middle of conversations with Sophia that deserved better than half my attention. Nothing came back. Not a word about R.C., not another lead, not even one of the short, clipped replies I'd started to expect.I told myself it didn't matter. I had the key, the date, the ledger. I didn't need a stranger feeding me scraps to keep moving forward. But some part of me had gotten used to the confirmation, the sense that someone else out there was watching the same threads I was, and the quiet felt heavier than it should have.Sophia's mother's charity gala gave me something else to focus on. A ballroom downtown, string quartet, silent auction tables lined with donated art nobody would actually bid on at retail price. Margaret ran these events every spring, and every spring Sophia insisted we go, and every spring I found myself standing near a bar counting exits out of hab

Voss stared at his own phone like it had bitten him."That's not… " He grabbed it, thumb fumbling against the screen, and I watched the color drain further from his face as he read whatever else had followed that first word. "That's not what it looks like.""It looks like Victor knows we're sitting in this room right now.""He doesn't. He can't." Voss's voice cracked on the second sentence, the kind of crack that comes from a man realizing, in real time, that a lie he's told himself for years has just stopped working. "It's probably nothing. A coincidence.""Show me."He hesitated, and for a second I thought he might refuse, might find some scrap of self-preservation to hide behind. Then he turned the phone toward me, screen unlocked now, the full message visible.*Careful. He's smarter than we gave him credit for. Don't say anything you can't take back.*I read it twice. Not a threat, not exactly. Something closer to a warning between two people who'd been managing a secret together

I got home a little after nine, still turning over the countdown in my head, still trying to figure out how eleven days could possibly be enough time to protect myself from a document that didn't even exist yet in its finished form.The apartment was too quiet when I walked in. Sophia usually had music on, low, something she played while she read or answered emails on the couch. Tonight there was nothing, just the hum of the refrigerator and a single lamp lit in the living room.She was sitting at the kitchen table when I found her, my folder open in front of her, papers spread out in a way I never left them.My stomach dropped before I'd even processed what I was looking at."Sophia."She didn't look up right away. When she did, her expression wasn't anger, not exactly. Something closer to hurt, layered over confusion, the specific look of someone who thinks they've found proof of something they didn't want to be true."I was looking for the stapler," she said. "For the invitations.