Chapter Six

VERA'S POV

Cole's reply comes in forty seconds.

"Where are you."

Not a question. I type back: *Kitchen. My mother is making eggs. Act normal.*

Three minutes later he walks through the back door like he'd been in the garden the whole time, easy and unhurried, and says good morning to my mother in that warm voice he has for her that I've decided I cannot afford to find endearing.

She offers him eggs. He accepts. He sits at the island two seats away from me and pours himself coffee and we do not look at each other directly once.

"David Lorne," I say quietly, under the sound of oil hitting the pan.

Cole's hand doesn't move on the mug. "Yes."

"My editor. Richard's friend. The man who's been sitting on my investigation for three months telling me to slow down and verify everything twice and not rush the story."

"Yes."

I stare at the counter. "He assigned me the story."

"I know."

"He put me on it. Handed it to me specifically." I keep my voice flat and even. "He's been managing me from inside the investigation."

Cole finally glances at me sideways. "Lorne has been moving money through a consulting arrangement with the organization for two years. His name isn't on anything primary — it's three layers deep in subsidiary contracts. That's what I needed to show you in person. The chain." He pauses. "He's not just Richard's friend. He's his insurance."

My mother sets plates in front of us and we both thank her and she pours herself tea and drifts toward the living room with her phone and the morning light and her complete, total ignorance of everything.

I pick up my fork.

"He gave me the story so he could watch it," I say.

"So he could kill it when necessary. Yes."

"He knows how close I am."

"Probably." Cole eats like we are having an ordinary morning. "Which means the timeline just changed."

"How long do we have?"

"Before he finds a reason to pull you off the piece or bury what you have? A week. Maybe less if he's already nervous." He sets down his fork briefly. "Does he know you're here? In this house?"

"He knows my mother remarried. I didn't tell him who." I think back through every conversation since the wedding, every check-in call, every casual question about how I was settling in. "He might have figured it out."

"Assume he has."

I look at him directly now because my mother is gone and there is no performance required. "If I take this to another editor Lorne finds out within hours. He and Richard will move everything before I can publish."

"I know."

"If I sit on it any longer something else breaks first — Lena Park is close, Cole. She doesn't have the financial records but she has enough of the outer structure to start making noise."

"I know that too."

"So what do we do."

He looks at me with that steadiness he has that I have stopped trying to dismiss as composure and started recognizing as something else entirely — the particular calm of someone who has already thought three moves ahead and is waiting for you to catch up.

"You go around Lorne," he says. "Completely. You take what you have directly to the publication's legal counsel and you file it as a protected submission. Lorne can't touch it once it's in legal review and he can't fire you mid-process without triggering a whistleblower flag."

"That only works if what I have is airtight."

"It will be after today."

We look at each other across the kitchen island and the air between us is doing the thing it does now — charged without apology, the awareness of the gala sitting in it like something neither of us has found a way to put down.

He reaches across and turns my phone face down on the counter without asking.

"Stop waiting for him to text you," he says. "You're not going to tell Lorne anything today."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were thinking about it."

"I was thinking about how to manage him so he doesn't get suspicious."

"Same thing." His hand is still near my phone, near mine, not touching but not far. "You manage him by going silent. People like Lorne get nervous when you give them too much access. Go quiet and let him wonder."

"You're good at this," I say.

"I grew up in it."

There's no self-pity in the way he says it. Just fact, delivered clean. It lands somewhere under my ribs anyway.

"Cole." I say his name carefully. "If this goes where I think it goes — if Lorne and your father are both named, if the organization is implicated — it ends your season. It might end more than that."

He doesn't flinch. "I know."

"You've thought about that."

"Vera. I've thought about nothing else for eight months." He finally pulls his hand back. "I didn't come to you with this to protect myself. I came to you because it's the only thing left that makes any of it mean something."

I don't say anything. There isn't anything to say that wouldn't feel insufficient.

He stands and takes both plates to the sink and rinses them and dries his hands and turns around.

"One hour," he says. "Then you leave and I'll send you the address."

"One hour."

He walks past me toward the stairs and his shoulder almost brushes mine and he doesn't stop but he slows — just slightly, just enough — and then he's gone and I'm standing in my mother's kitchen in a house that is a trap dressed as a home.

I pick up my phone.

There's already a message from Lorne.

*Just checking in. How's the family settling?*

I stare at it for a long moment.

Then I put the phone back down without responding.

Cole was right. Silence is better.