He stared at the plywood covering the windows in the fading light. He hadn't meant to drive there. He'd just found himself pulling onto the street out of habit, the way you keep reaching for a tooth that's already gone. He walked inside past the caution tape.
His boots crunched over drywall dust that still hadn't been swept away. He sat down on the stairs in the dim evening light. The house was quiet in a way that felt heavier than silence usually did, the kind of quiet that came after something had been taken and not yet given back. He thought about the vote that morning.
Four to one. A real win snatched back within the hour by people who'd never once set foot in this house. Using a system built to protect people exactly like him and turning it instead into a wall. His eyes drifted to the small closet tucked beneath the staircase where he was sitting.
He reached over without quite deciding to and pulled the door open. He ran his hand along the wall until his fingers found the cool metal edge of the lockbox bolted into the floor joist. The one thing the raid team had never thought to search because it didn't look like anything worth searching. He didn't open it.
Not yet. He just sat there in the dark, hand resting on the box, thinking about everything inside the department that had been buried and reburied for years before his own door ever came down. "They took my house apart looking for something illegal," he said quietly. His voice was the only sound in the empty room.
"They never once looked for something legal." Outside, the streetlights on Somerset Court flickered on one by one. Francis sat in the ruins of his own home. Finally, he understood what he needed to do next.
Francis sat on the stairs for a long moment before he finally pulled the lockbox free from its bracket and set it across his knees. The key was small, worn smooth from years of handling, kept on a ring he still carried out of habit even after he'd half-forgotten what it opened. He fitted it into the lock and turned it. The lid came up with a soft, familiar click.
Inside wasn't much to look at. A few old documents. His father's watch, stopped years ago. Underneath all of it was a thick spiral notebook, its cover worn soft at the corners and rubber-banded shut.
Francis pulled it out and slid the rubber band off carefully, like it might crumble. He'd started this notebook 11 years earlier, back when he was still a junior prosecutor working intake. It was the year the Brooks complaint had first crossed his desk before it ever went anywhere. He remembered reading that file back then.
A wrong address. A door kicked in. A family left with nothing but a closed case and no answers. He remembered feeling something he hadn't known what to do with.
He hadn't had the authority to reopen it. He hadn't had the power to do anything but watch it get buried. So he'd started writing it down. Dates.