Se connecter**Chapter 46 — "What Melvin Really Wants"**
The apartment Cassie had arranged for him didn't feel like his. Nothing had, not really, not since he woke up in that hospital bed with half his memory scattered somewhere on a stretch of highway he couldn't picture no matter how hard he tried. But this place, sleek and quiet and entirely her taste, felt less like his than anywhere else had.He stood at the window with a drink he wasn't really drinking, looking down at the city, anChapter 52 — "Jack's Guilt"Jack Blackwood had built his entire life on the belief that if he controlled enough variables, nothing could truly surprise him. He controlled the board. He controlled the narrative around Donovan's smear campaign. He'd even, in his own careful way, controlled how fast or slow things moved with Sora, giving her room when she needed it and closing distance when she didn't.He had not controlled this.Sora sat across from him in his penthouse, the folder Nephis had given her now sitting on the glass table between them like something radioactive. She'd told him everything, flat and careful, the way she'd told Melvin, and he'd listened without interrupting even once, which for Jack was its own kind of tell.When she finished, he didn't say anything for a long moment. He just looked at the page with the shell company's name on it like he could burn a hole through it with his eyes."Jack.""I heard you," he
Chapter 51 — "Melvin's Reckoning"Melvin was rearranging the same stack of mail for the third time when Sora knocked on his door.He almost didn't recognize the sound of it. Two years ago she would have just walked in, and before that, back when things were good, before he'd ruined it with his own hands, she wouldn't have needed to knock at all. Now she stood in the hallway of the apartment he'd rented after discharge, waiting, like a stranger."Hey," he said, opening the door. "I wasn't expecting.... this is a surprise.""Can I come in?""Yeah. Of course." He stepped back, and she came in carrying nothing but her bag and an expression he didn't like, the kind of careful blankness people wear when they've rehearsed something on the drive over."You want coffee? Water?" He was already moving toward the kitchen out of old habit, the muscle memory of being a husband, a host, a man who took care of things."Melvin." She sai
Chapter 50 — "The Truth About the Crash, Part 1"Nephis Lukeman didn't call ahead. She just showed up, on a Tuesday, at the little café two blocks from the consultancy's new office, and sat down across from Sora like they'd had this meeting scheduled for weeks."You're going to want to sit for this one," Nephis said. "Oh. You're already sitting. Good."Sora set her coffee down slowly. "You said that last time too. About the tip you gave me. It turned out to be true, so.... I'm listening. But I'm not going to pretend I trust you.""I never asked you to trust me." Nephis pulled a folder from her bag, thinner than the one she'd brought before, and placed it on the table without opening it. "I asked you to listen. There's a difference, and you of all people should know it by now.""Fine. I'm listening."Nephis didn't open the folder right away. She turned her coffee cup a quarter turn, like she was stalling, like even she needed a s
# Chapter 49 — "Donovan and Cassie, Unknowingly Parallel"Caster Donovan liked his office cold. Sixty-eight degrees, no lower, no higher, and if the thermostat drifted even a degree his assistant heard about it before her coffee got cold. Today it was sixty-eight exactly, and he was still sweating through his shirt."Say that again," he said.The man across from him.... Reyes, from legal, the one who always looked like he wanted to be somewhere else.... shifted in his chair. "The board wants a full accounting before Thursday. Where the tampering evidence came from. Who authorized the contractor. All of it.""They already have an accounting.""They have a story, Caster. There's a difference."Donovan stood and walked to the window because he needed his hands to be doing something other than forming fists. Down below, the city moved the way it always moved, indifferent, and somewhere in one of those buildings Jack Blackwood was sit
**Chapter 48 — "Miranda's Breaking Point"** The story broke on a Tuesday, buried at first in the business section, a small piece about family tension in the Harrison inheritance that read careful and speculative, sourced to "a person familiar with the matter." By Wednesday afternoon, two other outlets had picked it up, and by Wednesday evening, Miranda's phone had not stopped buzzing since lunch. She found Sora in the greenhouse, of all places, sitting where George usually sat, hands folded in her lap, staring at nothing. "You saw it," Miranda said. It wasn't a question. "George showed me an hour ago." Sora looked up, and something in her face made Miranda's chest tighten. "Miranda, I am so sorry. This is going to make everything so much worse for your family." "Don't." Miranda sat down hard on the bench across from her, suddenly exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. "Don't apologize to me.
**Chapter 47 — "Cassie's File Grows"**The folder had started small. A printout here, a screenshot there, nothing that would look like much if anyone found it lying around. Cassie kept it in the bottom drawer of her desk, under a stack of old medical paperwork from Melvin's recovery, because nobody thought to look under grief.She added to it that night, after leaving his apartment with her hands still faintly shaking.*I was there, before all of this, remember?*She shouldn't have said it. She'd felt the words slip out before she could catch them, felt Melvin's attention sharpen in a way that frightened her more than she wanted to admit. He was starting to remember. Not everything, not yet, but enough that she could feel the ground shifting under the careful story she'd built.She sat at her desk and opened her laptop instead of thinking about that too hard.The Harrison family had a lot of public information if you knew where t







