MAFIA BOSS HEARD THE WAITRESS ACCIDENTALLY CALL HIM “BABY” IN FRONT OF HIS ENTIRE CREW—THEN HE SMILED AND ORDERED HER TO SAY IT AGAIN.

The first thing I wanted to do was drive to David's apartment and demand answers in a language neither of us could misunderstand.

June Park asked me not to.

“His message may be an admission,” she said, standing in the empty club beneath a chandelier that cost more than my mother's car. “It may also be a frightened person trying to tell you what somebody told him to say. Give us the chance to establish which.”

I hated that patience was sensible. I'd been patient through eviction threats, the seven-hour shifts that turned into twelve, the funeral bill that kept arriving even after we paid it, and David's promises that always expired when I needed him. My father had been dead seven years. Waiting felt obscene.

Roman sent everyone else into the kitchen, then stayed behind the bar with his back to me. He neither tried to comfort me nor made an offer of revenge. The restraint was unnerving.

“Did you know David worked at Bellwether?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you recognize his name from the accident report?”

“Not yet. I asked Adele to obtain the old employment rosters.”

I studied the line of his shoulders. “You could probably find him before the detectives do.”

“Probably.”

“And what would you do?”

He turned. “A year ago, I might have had him brought to a room where he couldn't leave. I'd have called it getting answers.”

“What's different?”

“I'm starting to understand that answers obtained that way aren't necessarily true.”

I wanted to disbelieve him. Part of me still did. But that was the problem with somebody trying to change: you couldn't demand proof while refusing to notice any.

At two in the morning, June called. David had agreed to appear at a precinct with counsel. He was not under arrest. She wanted me to know because his next move might affect my safety.

I went back to Nina's couch and dreamed of a warehouse door painted yellow. In the dream, my father knocked from the other side while I searched for the handle. When I woke, my phone lay on my chest and dawn had begun pressing through the blinds.

David's interview wasn't mine to watch. June told me only that he had confirmed being near the terminal the night of the fire and was cooperating with certain questions. That was a careful sentence, probably a fair one. I hated every word.

At eleven, my mother insisted on going to the grocery store alone. “I am not a prisoner,” she declared.

“No, Mom. You're a person somebody visited to scare.”

“Then they should learn how irritating I can be.”

Nina offered to take her. My mother relented only after extracting a promise that they would buy the bread she liked, not “that expensive cardboard pretending to be sourdough.”

I stayed behind with the shoebox photographs, turning the one of my father beside his forklift. Behind him stood a young man in a yellow safety vest. A narrow face. A scar beneath the chin. I brought the picture closer.

It was David.

Younger, thinner, but unmistakable.

My father had stood beside the man I would date five years later. I had introduced David to my mother at a diner and watched him shake her hand as if they were strangers.

The deception made my skin crawl.

I called June and sent her the photograph. She asked for the original when we met. Then I called David, not to talk, but to hear whether his voicemail greeting still said his name. It did. I didn't leave a message.

That afternoon, Adele arranged a conference in a borrowed office near the courthouse. June attended as an observer, a labor attorney named Miriam Shaw represented some benefit claimants, and Roman sat at the far end without his guards. I had insisted my own legal adviser, a small, sharp-eyed woman named Priya Patel, accompany me. Priya had spent our initial phone call repeating one instruction: “Your history is not a debt anyone can collect.”

At the meeting, an independent accountant displayed the disputed fund transfers on a large screen. Eastbank Claims Services billed for claimant interviews, home visits, appeals, and “family outreach.” Some households had never received a visit. Others had moved or died years earlier. The signatures shared identical pen pressure despite supposedly being recorded in different states.

“Meaning one person may have generated them from a template,” the accountant said.

“Can you prove that?” Roman asked.

“Not from the scans alone. We need the original paperwork and server logs.”

Priya leaned toward me. “The distinction matters.”

The accountant moved to another page. A report from Bellwether Terminal listed approved contractors the week before the fire. One vendor had supplied replacement safety locks. Its invoice number ended in 047.

I thought of the message about Page Forty-Seven.

“Is that why they want the ledger?” I asked.

The room turned toward me.

“The page doesn't just list payments,” Roman said. “It references a shipment code. Forty-seven was the replacement-lock batch.”

“What was wrong with the locks?”

“We don't know yet.”

I stood abruptly, pushing my chair back with a sound that seemed too loud.

“My father died because he couldn't open a door,” I said. “And we're looking at a payment for the doors?”

The accountant nodded, miserable. “Possibly.”

I couldn't remain in the room. Priya followed me into the hallway, where I sat beside a vending machine and pressed both hands against my eyes.

“You don't have to be the strongest person here,” she said.

“I've been trying to get stronger for seven years.”

“You're allowed to be angry without becoming their entire case.”

She sat with me until I could breathe normally again.

When I returned, Roman had left the meeting table. He stood at the window holding a battered black wallet. Inside was an old photograph of two teenagers standing beside an enormous red fishing boat.

“My father,” he said, noticing my look. “And me. I was sixteen. He said the boat was a lesson: if the hull leaks, it doesn't matter how fine the captain's suit is.”

“Sounds wise for a man who made his money frightening people.”

“He could say wise things and do terrible ones. I'm old enough to stop pretending the first cancels the second.”

That surprised me more than the picture.

“Did he approve the lock replacement?”

“I don't know. I'm trying to find out.”

“You could lose everything.”

“Yes.”

“And if you do?”

He closed the wallet. “I might finally learn which parts of my life were mine in the first place.”

I didn't tell him that was almost romantic. I didn't want either of us distracted from what was at stake.

By late afternoon, Priya had persuaded me to go outside and walk around the block with her. The courthouse was bordered by food carts and impatient drivers. Nobody waiting at the crosswalk looked like a witness in a corporate fraud case. They looked like people going to lunch.

“How do you stop thinking about it?” I asked.

“You don't stop on command,” she said. “You find out what you can do today, then you permit tomorrow to be tomorrow.”

“I feel like everyone knew something except us.”

“Some people knew one detail. A few knew many. Plenty knew nothing. Be careful not to turn uncertainty into a conspiracy so vast you can never feel safe again.”

I wanted to argue, but I thought of Nina's groceries and my mother's chair against the door. Fear had already started making ordinary kindness look suspicious. I needed facts, not a story large enough to explain every stranger on the train.

We stopped at a florist's cart. The seller had small bunches of marigolds wrapped in brown paper. I bought one for Mom. The flowers reminded me of Dad's stubborn vegetable garden, which somehow produced marigolds every summer even when the tomatoes failed. I hadn't bought flowers for anybody in months because David always asked why I was wasting money. The three-dollar purchase felt surprisingly extravagant.

When Priya and I returned to the conference room, Roman was speaking with Adele about providing investigators with the complete lock-procurement correspondence. He didn't stop the conversation when I walked in. I heard him say, “Don't exclude documents that implicate me. If I signed it, they need it.”

It would have been easy to make a grand speech for my benefit. It was harder to say the same thing to the lawyer who might have to defend him.

Near evening, June obtained a statement from a former warehouse worker named Luis Mercado. He'd survived the fire after escaping through a loading bay. He recalled hearing the side door slam twice, then seeing a van depart without headlights. He had told investigators the same thing years ago, but his statement was missing from the final report.

“Where is Luis now?” I asked.

“Queens,” June said. “He agreed to speak again.”

Before she could say more, her phone rang. She listened, frowned, and moved away from the group. When she returned, the expression in her eyes changed the temperature of the room.

“The original worker interview files were scheduled to be moved from a private archive tonight,” she said. “Someone has requested their destruction as obsolete records.”

“Who requested it?” Priya asked.

June looked at Roman.

“Gallagher Waterfront Holdings,” she said. “Using an authorization bearing your electronic signature.”

Roman's face went pale.