GLASS HOUSES

Chapter Four

Elena didn't sleep. She sat on the edge of her bed with her phone in her hand, staring at the still frame Priya had sent, Julian's face caught clear as day under a streetlamp three blocks from the Ashworth house. Timestamped. Undeniable.

She thought about every conversation they'd had since that morning at the pool house. Every time he'd said he didn't know something, every careful pause before he answered a hard question. She thought about how she'd handed him a blanket an hour ago and let her fingers linger too long.

At five in the morning, she gave up pretending she was going to rest and walked out to the living room.

He was already awake, sitting upright on the couch, blanket pooled around his waist, looking like a man who hadn't slept either.

"You're up early," he said.

"So are you."

Something in her voice must have carried more than she meant it to, because his expression shifted, the sleepy warmth draining out of it fast. "What's wrong?"

Elena held up her phone, the still frame filling the screen, and watched his face while he looked at it. She'd interviewed enough people to know what guilt looked like when it landed, and what surprise looked like too. What she saw on Julian's face was neither. It was something closer to dread.

"Where did you get this?" he asked quietly.

"Facial recognition on the Ashworth's neighborhood cameras. Three nights before Mia died, Julian. Eleven forty-seven at night. You want to explain why you were three blocks from that house at midnight and never thought to mention it?"

He was quiet for a long moment, and Elena felt the silence stretch into something that scared her more than an outright lie would have.

"I was there," he said finally. "I didn't lie to you about not knowing what happened to Mia. I lied by omission about something else, and I've been trying to figure out how to tell you without it sounding like exactly what it looks like right now."

"Then tell me."

He rubbed both hands over his face, and when he looked at her again, the careful composure was gone entirely, replaced by something raw and exhausted. "Six months ago, when I found that settlement file, I didn't just find it and put it back. I started asking questions. Quiet ones. To people who'd been around the firm longer than me. One of them told me to go talk to Richard Ashworth directly if I wanted real answers, because Richard was the one who'd actually handled the original arrangement, before it got handed down to me."

"So you went to see him. At midnight. Three nights before his stepdaughter was murdered."

"Yes." His jaw was tight. "I went to his house because I didn't want Caroline to know I was asking. I stood outside for twenty minutes trying to decide if I actually wanted the answer to what I was about to ask him, and then I lost my nerve and left without ever knocking on the door. That's the whole truth, Elena. I know exactly how it sounds. I've known since I saw the alert on my own building's camera app twenty minutes after I left, because I still get security notifications for half the properties my firm represents."

Elena studied him, weighing every word against the ten years of instinct that had never once let her down on this job. Something about the specificity of it, the confession of cowardice rather than a clean alibi, read true in a way a rehearsed lie never did.

"Why didn't you tell me this from the start?"

"Because the second I say I was standing outside a house three nights before a murder happened inside it, I become a suspect. And once I'm a suspect, everything I've told you becomes suspect too. The settlement file. The families. All of it starts looking like a story I built to protect myself." His voice cracked slightly. "I needed you to trust what I was telling you about the case before I gave you a reason not to trust me."

"That's not your call to make, Julian. That's mine."

"I know that now." He met her eyes, and there was something almost pleading in it, though he didn't reach for her, didn't do anything to close the distance between them. "I should have told you last night. I almost did, a dozen times. I kept thinking about how you looked at me that first morning, like you already had me figured out as someone not to trust, and I didn't want to prove you right."

Elena sat down slowly in the armchair across from him, the anger in her chest tangled up with something else she didn't have a clean name for. "I need to bring this in officially. The footage, your statement, all of it. You understand that."

"I understand." He didn't argue, didn't reach for a lawyer's careful language to soften it. "I'll go on record with everything. The file. The families I suspect are involved. Richard. All of it, no privilege claims, no careful edits. I should have done that from the beginning."

"That could end your career."

"It might end worse than my career if whoever took that file from my office decides I'm a bigger risk than they can afford." He said it plainly, no self-pity in it, just fact. "I'd rather lose my career telling the truth than lose my life protecting a lie I never fully understood in the first place."

Something in Elena's chest ached at that, unwelcome and inconvenient and entirely real. She'd spent the last hour building a wall around herself, bracing for him to be exactly what her first instinct at the pool house had warned her he might be. Watching that wall c***k now felt more dangerous than watching it hold.

"I still have to take you in," she said quietly. "Formally. Today."

"I know."

"And I still don't know if I can fully trust you yet."

"I know that too." He almost smiled, though there was no real humor in it, just something tired and honest. "For what it's worth, Detective, neither do I. I've spent six years telling myself that not asking hard questions was the same thing as not knowing the answers. I don't get to feel innocent just because I never knocked on that door."

Elena's phone buzzed on the coffee table between them. She glanced down, expecting Priya again, and felt her stomach drop when she saw the name on the screen instead.

Caroline Ashworth.

She answered on the second ring. "Mrs. Ashworth."

Caroline's voice came through ragged, barely holding together. "Detective Cole. You need to come to the house right now. Richard's gone. He left sometime in the night, and he took the safe deposit box key with him, and there's blood on the kitchen floor that isn't mine."

Elena was already on her feet, grabbing her jacket, her eyes finding Julian's across the room. Whatever had been sitting between them a moment ago, guilt and honesty and the fragile beginnings of trust, all of it collapsed under the sudden, urgent shape of a second crisis unfolding in real time.

"We're on our way," Elena said, and hung up before Caroline could say anything else. She looked at Julian, already pulling his jacket off the back of the couch. "Richard Ashworth is missing. There's blood in the house."

Julian's face went pale. "That means whoever took my file already knows I talked to him."

"Or it means he ran before they could get to him." Elena grabbed her keys off the counter, her heart pounding with the particular adrenaline that came right before a case broke wide open in a direction nobody had planned for. "Either way, we need to move. Now."