All Chapters of Sixty Days To Leave You : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

SERA “He is not going to want to talk to us.” Daniel said it from the front seat without turning around. Matter of fact. The tone of a man who had spent years delivering uncomfortable truths to people who paid him not to soften them. “He does not have a choice,” Sera said. The car turned onto a narrow residential street. Old houses. Small gardens. The kind of neighbourhood where people moved when they wanted to disappear without going too far. Peter Sands had chosen the last house on the left. Brown paint peeling at the window frames. A dead plant on the front step that nobody had thought to remove. A man who had stopped caring what things looked like. Daniel pulled up and cut the engine. Sera was out before Elliot finished reaching for the door handle. She walked up the front path at a pace that did not invite conversation. She heard Elliot fall into step behind her. Close but not crowding. He had learned that about her somewhere in the last forty-eight hours. How much space s

ELLIOT “She is gone.” The housekeeper who answered the door at his mother’s house was young. A temporary hire. She looked at Elliot with the wide-eyed wariness of someone who understood she had walked into the middle of something that had been building long before she arrived. “What do you mean gone,” Elliot said. “Mrs. Voss gave her a month’s wages this morning and asked her to collect her things.” The girl shifted. “Rosa left about an hour ago. She did not say where she was going.” Elliot looked past her into the entrance hall. Everything in his mother’s house was exactly as it had always been. Polished. Arranged. Beautiful in the cold particular way of spaces designed to impress rather than welcome. He had grown up inside this aesthetic and never once questioned it. He questioned everything now. “Is my mother here.” “In the sitting room.” He walked in without waiting. Margaret was at the window. Standing, not sitting, which told him she had heard the car and positioned her

ELLIOT “Don’t move.” He said it the moment the elevator doors opened and he saw Whitfield standing beside his car. Quiet. Instinctive. The word landing in the space between them before either of them had time to calculate what came next. Whitfield moved anyway. Not fast. Not the desperate scramble of someone panicking. He turned and walked toward the exit ramp with the measured pace of a man who had already decided on his route before they arrived. That was the thing about Whitfield that Elliot had always mistaken for loyalty. He was never reactive. He planned everything three steps ahead and executed without visible emotion. Elliot moved faster. He crossed the car park in ten strides and put himself between Whitfield and the ramp. Whitfield stopped. Looked at him. The hard drives were in a bag over one shoulder and his phone was in his jacket pocket and his expression was the one Elliot had watched across boardroom tables for fifteen years. Composed. Impenetrable. The face of a

SERA “You have thirty seconds to tell me something worth hearing,” Sera said. “After that I hand this phone to a lawyer.” Faust made a sound. Low. Almost amused. The sound of a man encountering resistance he found genuinely interesting rather than inconvenient. “Your mother said something similar to me once,” he said. “The first time I had her followed.” The table had gone completely silent. Elliot was watching her face. Adrian had stopped dialing. Priya sat with both hands flat on the surface in front of her, perfectly still, the way she got when she was paying attention to everything at once. Sera kept her breathing even. “You spoke to her directly,” she said. “Once. Six weeks before she died.” A pause. Unhurried. Every second of silence costing her something he understood precisely. “She came to my office. Alone. She laid out everything she had found and told me she was prepared to take it to the regulator unless I came forward voluntarily.” Another pause. “She was thorough.

SERA “Don’t open it.” Elliot said it from across the table. Not loud. The particular quiet of a man who had already made a calculation and arrived at a conclusion before the sentence finished leaving his mouth. Nobody moved. The knock came again. Three beats. Unhurried. The knock of someone who did not know they had been found out and was waiting with the easy patience of a person who believed they were welcome. Sera looked at the door. She thought about Leo at university. Sitting across from her in the library at eleven at night, bringing her coffee she had not asked for, listening to her talk about her mother with the focused attention of someone who genuinely cared. She thought about him in Priya’s living room two days ago. The warm smile. The careful words. Make sure it comes from the part of you that has always known exactly who you are. She thought about how good he had been at it. How completely she had believed him. The grief of that was brief and sharp and she allowed