“You need to get this to someone who can trace it today, if possible.” “I know people,” Harper says. “Corporate security.” “But if I bring this to them and one of them planted it, then you’ll know who not to trust by how they react.” Harper looks up at him, something steadying behind her eyes despite everything unraveling around her.
“You think like someone who’s used to figuring things out with very little information.” “I fix things for a living,” David says. “Most of the time, the problem isn’t what people tell you it is. It’s what they don’t.” She almost smiles at that, tired but real. Then her phone rings again, and this time she doesn’t rush to answer it.
She stares at the screen a moment first, watching the name flash across it before finally lifting it to her ear. “Yes.” David watches her face change as she listens. Whatever’s being said on the other end drains the small warmth that had crept into her expression only moments earlier. Her knuckles whiten around the phone.
“When?” she asks. A pause. “Say that again.” David steps closer without meaning to, some instinct pulling him forward the way it did back at the fence line the very first morning. Harper lowers the phone slowly, her eyes finding his across the porch.
“That was security,” she says, voice barely above a whisper. “Someone accessed the estate’s private server two hours ago from inside the building.” She swallows hard. “They downloaded everything, every file, every recording, every private conversation held on this property for the last six months.” The porch light flickers once behind her, and somewhere past the treeine, an engine turns over and pulls away into the dark.
David’s phone buzzes at 11 that night. An unknown number lighting up the screen the same way Harper’s call once had. He answers, expecting her voice. Instead, a stranger speaks, calm and rehearsed, like the words were practiced in front of a mirror. “Mr. Harrison, you don’t know me, but I know you’ve been asking questions you shouldn’t be asking.”
David sits up straight in the dark of his living room. Nia’s door closed down the hallway, her nightlight glowing faint under the crack. “Who is this?” “Someone who wants to make this easy for you. $75,000 cash.”
“All you have to do is forget what you found in that fence post and finish the job like none of it ever happened.” David’s grip tightens on the phone. $75,000 is more than he’s made in the last three years combined. It’s a new truck. It’s Nia’s braces.
It’s the mortgage paid off early and a mattress that isn’t held together with duct tape. He thinks about all of it for exactly one second. “No,” David says. A pause on the other end, longer than expected. “You should think harder about that answer.”
“I already did.” The line goes dead. David sits in the dark a long while after, phone still in his hand, heart hammering harder than it has in years. He doesn’t call the police. Not yet.