Page 32 of The Advocate’s Ultimatum

“I don’t have time.”

JP shrugged. “Then you don’t have enough information to make a clean decision.”

“There is no clean decision.”

“No,” JP said. “There’s not.”

Silence settled again.

Sabre tapped her fingers against the table. “Bay isn’t lying about everything.”

“Like what?”

“She was protecting someone, and she said ‘her.’”

“You’re sure?”

Sabre nodded. “She caught herself. But it was there.”

“So, we’ve got a second girl and someone out there threatening the first one,” JP said.

Sabre looked at him. “And possibly watching both of them.”

Her phone buzzed. Both of them froze. The sound was small, but in the silence, it felt sharp. Sabre picked it up. It was the same number as the previous texts.

She opened the message. You never finished Hannah’s case.

She handed JP the phone.

JP took it and read it out loud.

“Hannah? Does that name mean something to you?”

Sabre was already churning through remembered faces, files, and stories. “Hannah…” she said quietly.

“Have you had more than one?”

“There were a few,” she said. “But there’s one that never sat right. I had the case early on, the first or second year I was practicing. A child went missing.”

“What was her name?”

“Hannah Caldwell.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“She just disappeared.”

“Abduction?”

“They never proved it.”

JP frowned. “What do you mean?”

Sabre hunched forward, feeling tense. “They had a suspect, a man connected to the family, and they built a case. The evidence was all circumstantial, but it was enough to move forward.”

“And?”

Sabre’s jaw tightened. “They convicted him. I never felt comfortable about the decision, but I didn’t see the trial, so maybe they had more than I knew about.”