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.

I called Voss back within a minute of reading his message. It went straight to voicemail, no ring, no delay … the kind of silence that comes from a phone already powered down.I typed back anyway, though I doubted he'd see it anytime soon. *Don't disappear. That makes you look guilty of something worse than talking to me. Stay visible. Stay normal. I'll handle Victor.*No response came. I sat with that for longer than I wanted to admit, running through the ways this could unravel … Voss vanishing and taking his evidence with him, or worse, Voss resurfacing somewhere convenient for Victor, recast as a liability rather than a witness.I didn't sleep well. By the time morning came, I found myself restless in a way that had nothing productive to do with itself, the kind of restlessness that used to send me to the cemetery even when I told myself I had no real reason to go.So I went.It was early, the light still thin and gray, the cemetery empty except for a groundskeeper working somewhe

The Grant dining room looked the way it always did for these occasions … too many candles, wine already poured before anyone sat down, Margaret's careful placements ensuring no two people who disliked each other ended up too close together. Nobody had told her to skip that courtesy tonight. I doubted it would have mattered.Victor sat at the head of the table, composed in a way that unsettled me more than his usual bluster would have. He waited until the appetizers had been cleared before he set down his fork and looked directly at me for the first time all evening."I have an announcement," he said, "though I suspect Ethan already knows what it concerns."Sophia's fork paused halfway to her mouth. I kept my face still, the way I'd trained myself to for three years, though every muscle in my body had gone tight."I don't know what you mean," I said."No. Of course not." Victor nodded to someone I hadn't noticed standing near the door … a lawyer, expensive suit, a leather folder tucked