Page 101 of Wells

I swing my legs out of bed and stand, pulling on the pants I left on the floor last night. I walk through the open living space, checking the bathroom first. Empty. I move to the kitchen, and there's no coffee brewing, no note on the island.

I double back to the bedroom and check the chair where she draped her bag last night.

Gone.

I stop in the middle of the room, the quiet pressing in harder now. She must have had an early class or somewhere to be. That is the easy answer, and it fits. She teaches at the rec center sometimes, and I know she goes there before work sometimes to set it up. She probably didn't want to wake me.

I grab my phone off the nightstand and open a text to her.

You left before I could accuse you of stealing the covers. And tell you good morning, beautiful.

I hit send and set the phone down, moving to the bathroom to shower. The hot water helps clear the last of the sleep fog, and by the time I towel off and dress, more solid, more like myself than I think I've ever been.

I walk into the office at six thirty, before the floor lights fully warm up and before anyone else is moving through the halls. The city outside is still hazy and not fully light, the kind of gray hour that's useful because no one can interrupt it.

My phone sits face down beside the keyboard. I checked it a minute ago. Still nothing from Cera. I leave it where it is and wake my system. Last night is still sitting warm in my chest, and I want to do something with the good of it, and the thing I do with a good mood is to be productive.

I told Vin I'd leave it to him, and I meant it. He's earned that a hundred times over, and he's right that I can't build a year of my life on a drunk's memory of a parking lot.

But there's one thread I can't hand off frayed, not if I want to sleep, and it's the smallest one in the whole thing. Dane swore the guards never called Vin that night. Vin said they did. Dane said he didn't even have Vin's number, with no reason on earth to lie about something that small.

So before I let it go and let Vin run the rest, I'll close this one loose end myself, the way I close everything, and I already know how it ends.

The records will back Vin, the drunk will be wrong exactly like Vin said, and I'll finally be able to stop turning it over. I pull the call logs from that night and start reading them with the question I never thought to ask a year ago, back when I already had my answer and only went looking to nod along with it.

Dane wasn't scrambled. There's no call from the guards to Vin that night. Not a connection, not a missed attempt, nothing. Whatever pulled Vin to that warehouse, it wasn't those two men, just like Dane said.

So I chase the calls that did get made, back into the burner traffic I cracked the first time and only ever read as Duvall's. One number keeps surfacing, a burner that went dark within days of the murder, and when I run down what's left of it, it doesn't dead-end in a Duvall account like every other thread I tagged back then. It runs into one of the offshore shells I mapped a year ago and could never find the bottom of.

And this time, with a thread in my hand I didn't have then, the bottom is there. The whole structure sweeps up and out into a single trust about eighteen months after Dad died, every dollar washed clean and tucked under one quiet name.

VDM Trust Services.

It takes me a second. Then all the air leaves my lungs.

Vincent Daniel Moreau.

But it can't be. He doesn't have money like that to front this sort of operation. He was paid well, paid like the man my father trusted past his own blood, but not enough to amass this kind of fortune. And the beneficiaries on that trust are coded, no name sitting behind the money at all. So maybe that's all this is.

I pull everything that trust ever touched, and all of it wears the same costume, art and acquisitions and antiques, the one corner of the world Vin knows better than anyone alive.

The floor goes out from under me. It's him.

Vin stood at the funeral in a black suit, gripping my shoulder when I couldn't make myself look at the casket. He taught me how the docks worked the summer I was seventeen and too angry to sit in a classroom, showed me how a manifest breathes and how the whole machine moves. He leaned across a booth from me a year ago at the Black Orchid and walked the money toward Duvall at my side, toward an answer that sat clean and never once sat right.

He steered me. He steered all of us, the whole time.

My chest aches. I close the file, and the name sits behind my eyes anyway. I lean back and try to make the math come out some other way, and it won't, and I can't make it come out his way either, so I'm stuck in the gap between the two with nothing holding me up on either side.

Where the fuck is Cera? I need her now, more than ever.

I pick up the phone again and type out another message, this one more urgent.

Please let me know you're okay. I'm starting to worry.

I hit send and watch the screen. The message delivers. I wait for the read receipt to update.

Five minutes pass. Then ten.