What Marcus knew

“You’re still up.”

Priya stood in the kitchen doorway at four in the morning, hair loose, watching Naomi like she already knew the answer.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Naomi said.

She’d stopped pretending she would, and had been sitting at Priya’s kitchen table with tea gone cold twice over. The apartment was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator. Outside, the city had that pre dawn stillness that almost passed for peace, if you didn’t already know better.

Naomi had a legal pad open in front of her, nothing organized about the notes, just fragments she needed outside her own head where she could actually look at them.

He knew I was innocent.

Marcus’s claim.

The sedan.

Three separate threads. Or maybe not separate at all.

She tapped her pen against the pad and thought back to Marcus outside the parole hearing. The careful way he’d chosen his words. The way his hands had trembled slightly before he spoke, like a man setting down something heavy he’d carried for over a decade.

What Marcus had told her was this.

Thomas Calloway hadn’t died the way the official prison report claimed. The report said heart failure, sudden, unremarkable, the kind of death nobody questions in a place already full of them. But Marcus had been three cells down. He’d heard things that night that never made it into any file.

There had been an internal incident report. Marcus had seen it once, years later, when a guard he still kept in contact with let something slip he immediately regretted. The report said Thomas Calloway had requested medical attention hours before he died and been denied it, a clerical delay that turned into something no one wanted their name attached to.

And Vivian Calloway had known.

Not immediately. But eventually, once the story had already calcified into something clean and useful, the wrongful conviction of a good man, dead too soon, a tragedy with no further questions required. Surfacing the internal report would have meant admitting the story wasn’t as simple as she needed it to be. It would have meant admitting there had been a window, hours long, where her husband might have lived if someone had cared enough to act.

She had buried it instead. For over a decade, she had chosen the clean story over the true one, because the clean story was the one that let Julian build a case worth avenging.

Naomi set her pen down.

She’d cried about it the night Marcus told her, the kind of crying that leaves you scraped hollow afterward. Not only for Thomas Calloway, a man she’d never met. She’d cried because somewhere underneath six years of careful contempt, some stubborn part of her still wanted to call Julian and tell him, still wanted to be the one to say it gently instead of watching it destroy him in public. She hated that instinct. It hadn’t gone anywhere.

Then something in her had gone very still, the way the air stills right before weather decides what it’s going to do.

She needed proof. Not Marcus’s memory of a conversation. The actual report. Without it, she had nothing that could survive contact with Calloway Holdings’ legal team for even a single afternoon.

At some point past midnight her thumb had hovered over his contact information in her phone before she’d caught herself and locked the screen. She didn’t examine too closely what she would have even said. Some habits didn’t care that the marriage was over.

Then she thought of what proving this would actually do to him, the last true thing left of his father’s memory turning out to be another story his own mother had bent into shape, and some cold, satisfied part of her was glad. He had built six years of cruelty on a story he never questioned. Let him sit with what was underneath it.

Priya was already digging. Her contacts in state records ran deep, but these things took time when a powerful family had spent a decade making sure certain documents were difficult to locate.

Naomi reached for her tea, found it stone cold, and set it back down.

Her phone lit up on the table.

Unknown number.

She stared at it. One ring. Two.

She let it ring once before answering. “Naomi Ashford.”

A pause. Then a man’s voice, careful and low. “You don’t know me. My name is Walter Griggs. I worked records compliance for the state corrections system for nineteen years, most of it at the facility where Thomas Calloway was held.”

Naomi went still.

“I believe you’ve been looking for something,” he said. “And I believe I know where it went.”

Her grip tightened around the phone. “How did you get my number?”

“Marcus Webb,” he said. “He told me you could be trusted with it.”

Naomi looked out the window at the empty street below. The same street where the sedan had idled without headlights less than three hours earlier.

“What exactly do you have?” she asked.

“Not on the phone,” he said. “I’m in the city through Thursday. After that this conversation didn’t happen.”

“Where,” she said.

He named a diner on the edge of downtown, off the main corridor. Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock.

He hung up before she could ask anything else.

Naomi sat there a moment, phone still warm against her palm, her pulse faster than she wanted to admit. She made herself breathe slowly and think it through.

Marcus trusted this man enough to hand over her number. That mattered. Marcus hadn’t survived what he’d survived by being careless.

But something else was sitting at the edge of her thinking, refusing to be ignored.

Julian’s legal team had quietly reorganized the corrections liaison files roughly two years ago, right around the time she’d first started making informal inquiries after the divorce. She’d assumed it was routine. Now it looked like something else entirely.

Julian had known someone might eventually come looking.

Which meant he’d prepared for it.

Which meant whatever Walter Griggs had managed to hold onto before those files were reorganized was exactly the thing Julian had tried hardest to make sure no one would ever find.

Naomi stood, crossed to Priya’s bedroom door, and knocked twice.

“Priya,” she said quietly. “Wake up. Something just happened.”

She heard movement behind the door.

“Bring your laptop,” Naomi added. “We need everything we can find on a man named Walter Griggs before nine tomorrow morning.”