I know, Elena said. She stood and walked to the window. 14 floors down, Chicago moved through its Friday night. Cars, lights, people going places, the great indifferent machinery of a city that didn't know or care about what was happening in this room. Somewhere south of where she stood, 12,000 people were going about their evening in neighborhoods that were still on a demolition list.
Reverend Odinwald had called that afternoon. He was steady, still organizing, still holding his community together without triggering alarm, but she could hear the strain underneath his steadiness. People were starting to ask questions. The surveys, the city contractors, the vague official language. It was adding up for some of the sharper-eyed residents.
They could feel something coming. They just didn't know its shape yet. Elena pressed two fingers against the cold glass of the window. Lenora's voice came back to her from the lobby phone call. 30 days.
That had been 9 days ago. 21 days left before the financing window closed and Meridian Rising became, in the cold language of done deals, irreversible. Brad had his replacement capital. The AG's office had gone cold. The whistleblower was silent.
The evidence was real and solid and completely inaccessible through the channels they'd been building toward. Elena ran through it once more in her head, slowly, methodically, the way she'd learned to audit a financial model when something didn't balance. You didn't panic when the numbers were wrong. You went back to the beginning and looked for what you'd missed. She'd been building outward, investigators, journalists, attorneys general.
All of it real. All of it valid. All of it contingent on chains of evidence that Brad had now twice managed to disrupt from the outside. She hadn't gone inward. She hadn't gone back to the source.
She turned from the window. Mattie looked up. I need to make a call, she said. He checked the time. It's almost 2:00 in the morning.
I know. Elena picked up her phone. She pulled up Lenora Harrington's number. Her thumb hovered over it for one second. Not hesitation, just the breath you take before something changes.
She pressed call. It rang twice. Lenora picked up. Lenora answered on the second ring. I wondered when you'd call, she said.
Her voice was unhurried, clear, and carried none of the fog of someone pulled from sleep. She had been awake. Elena suspected she had been awake for several nights running. The same way you stay awake when something you set in motion a long time ago is finally approaching the moment it either lands or doesn't. I watched his press conference, Lenora said before Elena could speak.