Chapter five: Fractured Alliances

 The rain hadn’t stopped since the funeral. It was like the sky didn’t know when to quit. I walked beside Lucas through the downpour, his coat draped over my shoulders, my shoes sinking into the mud with every step. 

Reporters stood by their cars, cameras hidden under umbrellas. None of them said a word, but their silence was louder than anything they could’ve printed.

Lucas’s house was quiet, too quiet. It smelled like coffee and old wood, a place that had seen better days. He opened the door and motioned me inside without a word.

 I sat down on the couch, and he disappeared into the kitchen. The sound of his kettle filled the silence until it almost felt safe again.

When he came back, he handed me a mug and said, “Drink.”

I didn’t argue. I didn’t have the energy to.

The tea burned my throat, but it seemed more like it was exactly what I needed to make me feel something other than hollow.

“How are you holding up?” he asked after a while.

I let out a shaky breath. “I’m still breathing. That’s about it.”

He nodded, like he understood what that meant. Maybe he did.

Days blurred after that. I stayed at the house because I had nowhere else to go. Ethan’s people had made sure the world saw me as the villain, and the internet had done the rest. Drunk mother kills her child. They turned my life into headlines while I was still trying to remember how to live in it.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Liam’s face. Sometimes he was laughing, sometimes crying, sometimes gone before I could reach him. Sleep was a trap I didn’t want to fall into.

On the third day, I found a brown folder on the coffee table with my name written in Lucas’s handwriting. Inside were papers—receipts, reports, timestamps. The kind of things that only existed when someone wanted to cover their tracks.

“What’s all this?” I asked, flipping through the pages.

“Proof,” he said, leaning against the counter. “You said you wanted names. I started digging.”

The first page stopped me cold. It was an ambulance record—the one from the night of the crash. The report said the call came in at 6:42 p.m., but Ethan’s statement to the press said the accident happened at 6:15. That’s almost thirty minutes of nothing. Thirty minutes where my son was dying and no one came.

My hands started shaking. “Why would they lie about the time?”

“Because someone needed time to make the story fit,” Lucas said. “To make you look guilty.”

My stomach twisted. “Ethan.”

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. I could see it in his face.

Ethan had done this. My husband. The man who had held me through every supposed storm had built one for me to drown in.

“Why would he do that?” I whispered. “Why spin something like this?”

Lucas’s voice went low. “Because that’s what people like him do. They don’t fix messes—they bury them.”

I stared at the papers again. The lies were right there, written in ink, timestamped, documented. But it wasn’t enough. Not yet.

“What’s the plan?” I asked finally. “If you’re going to help me, then we do this properly.”

He looked at me for a long time before speaking. “We find who made the call, who signed off the ambulance transfer, who sent the car that hit you. We trace it back until we hit something real. But Serena—once you start this, there’s no turning back.”

“I already buried my son,” I said. “There’s nothing left to turn back to.”

That shut him up.

For the next few days, we worked. Lucas knew things—how to dig into private records, track payments, trace numbers that were never meant to be found. He showed me how to read things differently. Where I saw invoices, he saw bribes. Where I saw contracts, he saw chains.

He was patient, methodical, like he’d done this before. Sometimes I’d catch him staring at the window for too long, lost somewhere between guilt and anger. I didn’t ask about it. We were both carrying ghosts.

Then one night, he slid his laptop toward me. “You need to see this.”

On the screen was a still frame from a traffic camera—the night of the crash. Grainy, blurry, but enough to make my blood go cold. A dark sedan was parked half a block away from the site. The license plate was barely visible, but Lucas zoomed in until a few letters appeared clear as day.

“Recognize it?” he asked.

I didn’t, but he did. “It’s registered under one of Warrick’s contractors. They use him for… sensitive jobs. Code name Garnet.”

My throat went dry. “So someone was following me?”

“Or making sure the job was done,” he said quietly.

The room went silent. For a second, I thought I might throw up. The idea that it wasn’t just an accident, that someone had actually planned this—it was too much to process.

“What happens if we find him?” I asked.

“We don’t go to the police,” Lucas said. “Not yet. They’re on Ethan’s payroll. We corner Garnet. Make him talk. Then we decide what to do.”

“You mean I decide.”

He met my eyes. “Yeah. You decide.”

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat by the window watching the city lights flicker under the rain. My son was gone, my name was dirt, and the man I had loved was living free on a lie. But for the first time in weeks, something started to burn again inside me. Not grief. Not pain.

Fire.

Lucas came into the living room just as the sun was rising. He dropped a phone on the table and said, “We got a lead. Garnet’s meeting someone tonight.”

I looked up at him. “Then we’ll be there.”

He nodded once, no argument. He didn’t need to say what we were both thinking—that tonight wasn’t just about finding answers. It was about the first real move.

The first step toward making Ethan Warrick’s world fall apart, piece by piece.