Chapter 5
711 Words
Sleep never came.
I lay in bed staring at the ceiling until the digital clock beside me read 2:17 a.m.
Then 2:46.
Then 3:11.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the warehouse.
The cameras.
The symbol painted across the concrete wall.
Cross walking through the courtyard as if he belonged there.
By four o’clock, I’d given up pretending I was going to sleep.
I climbed out of bed, switched on my desk lamp and opened my laptop.
The familiar glow of the screen settled my nerves almost immediately.
Computers made sense.
People rarely did.
A clean notebook lay in the top drawer of my desk.
I pulled it out, uncapped a pen and wrote one sentence across the first page.
Everything I Know.
I stared at the words for a moment before writing beneath them.
* Adrian received a message the night he died.
* The message came from the warehouse.
* The warehouse isn’t abandoned.
* Cross was there.
* Cross knew Adrian.
I stopped.
Five facts.
That was it.
Everything else was speculation.
I turned the page.
Questions.
The list grew much faster.
Who sent the message?
What was buried?
What did the symbol mean?
Why was Adrian at the warehouse?
Who was Cross?
What kind of organisation operated out of that building?
I tapped the end of my pen against the paper.
Something bothered me.
I reached into my backpack and took Adrian’s phone out again.
It landed softly on my desk.
I unlocked it and opened the recovered files.
The phone had been cleaned.
Professionally.
Not completely.
Just enough to fool someone who wasn’t looking.
Yesterday I’d been so focused on recovering the deleted message that I’d ignored everything else.
Now I looked again.
This time, I wasn’t searching for what was there.
I was searching for what wasn’t.
Photos.
Gone.
Call logs.
Almost empty.
Emails.
Missing.
Someone had removed entire sections of Adrian’s digital life.
I frowned.
That wasn’t what bothered me.
I checked the system logs.
Then checked them again.
My pulse slowed.
No.
That couldn’t be right.
I opened another program and compared the timestamps.
There it was.
The last major deletion hadn’t happened before Adrian died.
It happened afterwards.
I sat back in my chair.
The room suddenly felt colder.
Adrian had died just after two in the morning.
Someone accessed his phone nearly forty minutes later.
I read the timestamp again.
Forty-one minutes.
Which meant only one thing.
Adrian hadn’t wiped his phone.
Someone else had.
I leaned back slowly.
The question wasn’t whether my brother had been hiding something anymore.
That much was obvious.
The real question was who had wanted to hide it after he was gone.
I closed my eyes.
Forty-one minutes.
Someone had his phone.
Someone knew what was on it.
Someone had decided what the rest of us were allowed to see.
A knock at my door startled me.
I slammed the laptop shut on instinct.
“Come in.”
The door opened slowly.
Mrs. Ellis, our housekeeper, stepped inside carrying a mug.
“I thought you might still be awake.”
She placed the mug on my desk.
Hot chocolate.
Exactly the way she’d made it since I was ten.
“You didn’t sleep,” she said gently.
It wasn’t a question.
I managed a small smile.
“I tried.”
She nodded as though that was answer enough.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
Then she glanced towards Adrian’s phone.
“I miss him too.”
The words caught me off guard.
Everyone else spoke about Adrian carefully, as though saying his name too often might break something.
Mrs. Ellis never did.
She simply missed him.
“So do I.”
She squeezed my shoulder before leaving the room.
The silence returned.
I opened my notebook again.
Under Questions, I added one more line.
Who had Adrian’s phone after he died?
I stared at it for a long time.
Then I looked back at the name I’d written earlier.
Cross.
He was still the only person I could connect to Adrian’s last known movements.
Maybe he had sent the message.
Maybe he hadn’t.
But one thing was becoming painfully clear.
If I wanted answers…
I was going to have to find him.
- Writer
