Chapter 4
1329 Words
Morning came too fast.
I woke up to the smell of burnt coffee and the sound of quiet voices down the hall. For a second I thought it was a dream. Then I remembered the safe room. The files. The kids.
I got up, washed my face, and went to the kitchen.
Maya was at the stove, flipping pancakes with the kind of focus most adults didn’t have. Lena was setting the table, humming under her breath. Noah was scrolling through something on a tablet, but he looked up when I walked in.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning,” I said back. My voice sounded rough.
Maya didn’t look at me right away. She slid a pancake onto a plate, then finally glanced over. “You slept.”
“Barely,” I said. “You?”
“Three hours,” she said. “That’s normal.”
Normal. Right.
Silas came in from the hallway, hair still damp from a shower. He stopped when he saw me, like he was waiting to see if I’d walk out.
I didn’t.
“I made coffee,” he said. “It’s probably bad.”
“It is,” Maya said without looking up.
Silas winced. “I’m working on it.”
I sat down at the table. Lena put a plate in front of me. “Maple syrup. We got some yesterday.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We ate in silence for a few minutes. Like we were all testing the edges of this new thing.
Finally, Maya broke it. “So. What’s the plan?”
Silas looked at me.
I put my fork down. “First of all, you need to tell me everything in those files. All of it. And then we figure out if there’s a way to use them without getting all of us killed.”
Maya’s shoulders dropped a fraction. Relief.
Silas nodded. “After breakfast. I’ll show you the full timeline.”
Noah perked up. “Does that mean we’re not leaving today?”
“Not today,” Silas said. “Not unless we have to.”
Lena let out a breath she’d been holding. “Good. I like it here.”
I looked around the kitchen. It was normal. Too normal for what was going on. Sunlight through the window, cereal boxes on the counter, Maya arguing with Noah about who got the last pancake.
It felt like a lie. And it felt like the only real thing I had left.
After breakfast, Silas took me back to the safe room.
This time, the kids stayed upstairs with Maya. She didn’t say why, but I got the feeling she didn’t want them hearing all of it again.
Silas pulled up a chair and opened the laptop.
“Start here,” he said.
The first file was dated six years ago. A contract between Silas’s old company, Vantage Holdings, and a construction firm called Denton Civic Works. On the surface, it was for renovating the city library.
The numbers didn’t match.
“See this?” Silas pointed. “Vantage billed the city for $4.2 million. The construction firm only received $1.8 million. The rest moved through three shell companies in the Caymans, then back into campaign funds for three council members.”
I scrolled. Page after page of transfers, dates, names. Aisha’s notes were in the margins.
“She was meticulous,” I said quietly.
“She had to be,” Silas said. “If the files weren’t airtight, we’d have no case. And no protection.”
I kept reading. Project Vantage. Project Harbor. Project Summit. All city contracts. All inflated. All connected to the same three council members: Marcus Webb, Elaine Cho, and Robert Kessler.
Marcus Webb. The name sounded familiar. Then I remembered — he’d been on the news last month for resigning suddenly. “Health reasons.”
Silas saw me pause. “He’s the one who ordered the hit,” he said. “Or at least, he’s the one who paid for it.”
I closed the laptop. My hands were shaking again.
“Why didn’t you go to the feds?” I asked.
“We tried,” Silas said. “Aisha’s friend in Chicago connected us with a DOJ contact. But the contact went silent a week later. Then we found out he’d been transferred to a desk job in Alaska. We didn’t trust anyone after that.”
“So you’ve been sitting on this for six years.”
“I’ve been keeping my kids alive for six years,” he said.
I couldn’t argue with that.
Silas leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “The reason I brought you here now is because things changed last month. Someone sent a photo to my old email. A photo of this house. Taken at night. From across the street.”
My stomach dropped.
“They found us,” I said.
“I think so,” he said. “But they haven’t made a move yet. That’s why I’ve been jumpy. Why I had told you not to touch the study.”
I thought about the last month. Silas working late. Changing the locks. Installing cameras I thought were for break-ins.
It wasn’t paranoia. It was preparation.
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
Silas looked at me, really looked.
“I want to end it,” he said. “I want to use these files. Go public. Take them down. But I won’t do it unless you’re with me. And unless the kids are safe.”
“And how do we make them safe?” I asked.
Silas hesitated. “I have a contact. A journalist in Chicago. Maya’s been talking to her encrypted. She said if we have the full files, she can publish them. Once it’s public, they can’t kill us without it looking obvious. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best shot we have.”
I nodded slowly.
“And if it goes wrong?” I asked.
Silas’s jaw tightened. “Then we run again. But this time, we will run together.”
We spent the rest of the day in the safe room.
Silas walked me through every file, every email, every scanned contract. Maya joined us in the afternoon, bringing documents she’d been compiling herself. She’d been tracking news articles, property records, social media posts. She was good. Scary good.
“You should be a detective,” I told her during a break.
Maya shrugged. “I just don’t want to run anymore.”
Lena and Noah came down for dinner. They ate in the safe room with us, sitting on the cots, asking questions I wasn’t sure how to answer.
“Are the bad men coming for us?” Lena asked, pushing her pasta around her plate.
“No,” Silas said immediately. “Not while I’m here.”
Lena looked at me. “What about you?”
I hesitated. Then I said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
Lena smiled, small and real.
That night, after the kids were asleep upstairs, Silas and I sat in the kitchen with the laptop open between us.
Maya had sent a message to the journalist.
“She said she can meet,” Silas said. “In Chicago. Three days from now.”
“Three days,” I repeated.
“We’d have to leave the day after tomorrow,” he said. “Drive. No flights. Too traceable.”
I looked at him. “And the kids?”
“Maya stays here with them,” he said. “It’s safer if we split up. If something happens to me, she knows what to do.”
I didn’t like it. But I understood it.
“You trust her with that?” I asked.
Silas smiled, tired and proud. “She’s been running since she was ten. She’s better at this than I am.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She is.”
Will everything become normal again?
- Writer
