PLAYING FOR HER HEART

Chapter Five: What the Walls Remember

Those words kept playing repeatedly in Ava’s brain.

*She can't find out*

She spent the rest of that evening back at her hotel doing what she did best, making lists. Everything she knew. Everything she suspected. Everything that didn't add up.

Fact one, Her father, Daniel Monroe, had died in a fire at Carter Racing's fabrication building twenty years ago. Official cause: faulty wiring.

Fact two, Ethan didn't believe the official report, and had said so, unprompted, to a journalist he'd known for exactly one day.

Fact three, Victoria Sinclair's family money had propped up the team roughly fifteen years ago, exactly five years after the fire, in the kind of financial trouble that industrial disasters and quiet settlements tended to leave behind.

Fact four, Someone inside the building had noticed Ava's arrival within hours and reported it to someone else, in a tone that suggested her presence had been anticipated, perhaps even feared.

Fact five, Someone had threatened her, by name, referencing her father specifically.

She stared at the list until the words blurred, until the numbers on the hotel clock ticked past midnight, and finally, exhausted past the point of caution, she fell asleep with her laptop still open on the bed beside her.

The next morning, she arrived at the factory earlier than usual, hoping the quiet hour before the official workday might yield something the curated, watched hours never would. She badged through the main entrance , and made her way toward the fabrication wing, the part of the building she hadn't yet had official reason to visit.

It was the wing where the fire had happened.

She told herself she was simply orienting herself, familiarizing herself with the factory's geography for the biography's sake. It was, at best, a partial truth, the kind she'd gotten very practiced at telling herself over the last three years.

The fabrication wing had clearly been rebuilt at some point, newer paint, newer flooring, it had the particular sterile brightness of a space that had been scrubbed of its own history. But the bones of the building, the load-bearing structure visible in the exposed steel beams overhead, looked old enough to have survived whatever had happened here two decades ago.

She walked slowly, letting her eyes trace the seams where old construction met new, the places where a keen observer might spot the scar tissue of a disaster beneath a fresh coat of paint. Halfway down the main aisle, she found one, a section of flooring subtly darker than the rest, as if it had been poured at a different time by a different crew, and above it, a stretch of ceiling where the support beams looked newer, cleaner, less weathered than their neighbors. This was where it happened, she thought, with a certainty that had nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with the strange, magnetic pull she'd felt the moment she stepped into this wing. Her father had died standing somewhere near this exact spot, and the building had simply been patched up and painted over and handed back to men who built race cars, as though grief were a structural defect that could be sanded down and primed.

She was crouching to examine the discolored flooring more closely, phone raised to photograph it, when the sound of an opening door somewhere ahead sent her scrambling upright and retreating toward the shadow of a support beam, her heart hammering at the thought of being caught crouched over the exact spot she had no official reason to care about.

She was standing beneath one of those beams, trying to imagine the shape of the room as it might have looked twenty years earlier, when she heard voices drifting from an adjoining break room. Low and unhurried, the voices of men who thought they there were alone.

"...still can't believe they let a journalist walk around in here," one voice was saying, "After everything."

"Denise vetted her. Corporate board wanted the biography for the sponsorship deck. Nobody upstairs thinks it's a problem." A second voice, younger, uncertain.

"Nobody upstairs was here in ninety-nine." A pause, the clink of a coffee mug against a counter. "I was. I remember what this wing looked like after. I remember the smell for about a year after they'd finished the rebuild, like it never quite left the walls."

"They said it was wiring."

A humorless laugh. "They said a lot of things. You weren't around for the inspection reports before they got revised. I was on the crew that pulled the original documentation for the insurance claim. Numbers didn't match what corporate submitted. Not by a little. By a lot." The older voice dropped lower, and Ava found herself holding her breath, pressing herself flatter against the cold steel beam, terrified of the smallest sound giving her away. "There was a cover-up. I'd stake my pension on it. Somebody decided a dead engineer was cheaper than the lawsuits a real investigation would've triggered, and somebody else made sure the paperwork agreed."

"Jesus, Frank. You can't say things like that."

"I've kept my mouth shut for twenty years," Frank said. "Watched good people get quietly moved to other teams, or paid off, or just … disappear from the roster with no explanation, whenever they started asking the wrong questions. There was a data engineer back then, sharp guy, always asking about the maintenance logs on the old fabrication equipment. Nice fella. Had a little girl, I remember, used to bring her picture into work, taped it up by his terminal. He’s the one who died in the fire. And within a month of the funeral, half the paperwork trail he'd been building just vanished." He exhaled, long and heavy, the sound of a man setting down a weight he'd carried a long time. "I'm sixty-three years old and I've got a grandkid starting college next year. I'm not saying anything to anybody who matters. I'm just saying it to you, in a break room, because sometimes a man's got to say a true thing out loud or it eats him alive."

Silence stretched between them, heavy enough that Ava could hear her own pulse hammering in her ears, could hear the distant hum of the factory's ventilation system, could hear with a jolt of pure adrenaline the unmistakable scrape of a chair being pushed back, someone standing, someone about to walk out of that break room directly toward the beam she was hiding behind.

She had perhaps three seconds to decide what to do.

She could run… but running would mean footsteps, would mean discovery, would mean whatever fragile trust she'd built at Carter Racing collapsing in an instant of humiliating, undeniable evidence that she'd been eavesdropping. She could stay perfectly still and hope the geometry of the space hid her but the break room door was swinging open even as the thought formed, hinges groaning, and there was nowhere left to go.

Ava pressed herself into the narrow gap between the steel beam and a stacked wall of shipping crates, holding her breath, willing her heartbeat to slow, watching through a sliver of space as a heavyset man in grease-stained overalls, Frank, she assumed, stepped out into the corridor and turned, with agonizing slowness, in her exact direction.

He stopped less than ten feet from where she was hidden, close enough that Ava could smell the machine oil on his overalls, close enough to hear the younger man trailing anxiously behind him, still muttering something about liability and NDAs that Frank didn't seem to be listening to.

He was looking directly at the crates.

And in the half-second before he opened his mouth to speak, Ava understood, with sudden and terrible clarity, that whatever happened in the next five seconds would determine whether she remained a journalist quietly gathering evidence or became the next name someone at Carter Racing decided was too expensive to let live.