Chapter 58

Alejandro’s POV

His name was Reeves.

Not the same Reeves as Candy, different family entirely, which was either a coincidence or the universe’s idea of a joke.

He was small, unremarkable looking, the kind of man who disappeared in a crowd without trying, which Marlo told me was precisely the point.

He wore a grey jacket, ordered tap water and sat across from me in the corner booth of a restaurant nobody important ate at with the quiet, unhurried energy of someone who had done this enough times that nothing surprised him anymore.

I liked that about him immediately.

“What do you need,” he asked, no preamble, no small talk.

“Everything,” I replied. “On a woman named Mira Martinez. Full history. Employment, family, medical if you can get it, financials, everything that exists and everything that was buried.”

He nodded slowly, turning his water glass once on the table. “Timeline?”

“As fast as thorough allows.”

“Thorough takes ten days minimum for a full workup.”

“Then you have ten days.”

He named a number. I agreed to it without negotiating because time mattered more than money and it always had. He pocketed the envelope I slid across the table, stood up, buttoned his jacket, and left without finishing his water.

The whole meeting had taken eight minutes.

I sat there for a while after he’d gone, staring at the empty seat across from me, turning my phone over in my hands.

Outside the window the city moved through its afternoon without any awareness of or interest in the fact that I was systematically dismantling every wall Mira Martinez had ever built around herself.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

I ordered a coffee I didn’t really want and drank half of it.

Candy was on the phone when I got back, pacing the length of the living room in heels she apparently wore inside the house, speaking in the clipped, assured tone of someone who ran things.

She glanced over when I walked in, raised one finger in the universal gesture of give me a moment, and I walked straight past her and up the stairs without breaking stride.

I heard her call after me for a second but I kept walking.

My office was the one room in this house she hadn’t touched yet, whether out of strategy or instinct I didn’t know, but I was grateful for it.

I sat behind my desk and pulled up my laptop trying to do actual work for approximately twenty minutes before I gave up and just sat there.

The folder my father had given me was in the top drawer.

I hadn’t looked at it again since that night. I’d put it there and closed the drawer telling myself I was waiting for Reeves to bring me something more complete before I went through it again. Which was true. It was also true that I wasn’t entirely ready for what reading it slowly and properly would do to me.

I opened the drawer and took it out anyway.

When I opened it to the first page, the photograph was there again of her younger face, that careful closed expression, the lighting that made everything look like something it wasn’t. I looked at it for longer this time, past the initial shock of recognition, and tried to see what I’d missed the first time.

She looked tired.

Not the kind of tired that a night’s sleep fixed but the chronic kind, the kind that settled into a person’s bones when they’d been surviving on adrenaline and necessity for too long.

I knew that kind of tired because I’d seen its reflection in my own face during the years right after my mother died, when I’d been filling every empty space with noise and speed and other people’s bodies.

We were more alike than either of us had said out loud.

I turned to the employment records.

Scarlett’s first. Two years of shifts, the dates telling their own story when you looked at them against the timeline of her stepfather’s presence in her life, the police report she’d filed and withdrawn, the school records that stopped abruptly in the middle of what should have been her final year.

Each page connected to the next like a chain, one thing leading directly to another, and I sat there in my quiet office and read through all of it letting myself feel every part of it without putting it somewhere manageable.

She had done what she had to do.

With no mother, no support, no safety net, she had found a way to keep herself alive and she had kept doing it until she found another way, then she had walked into a job interview she had no business landing and she had landed it anyway because that was who Mira Martinez was at her core.

Stubborn. Resourceful. Furious at the world in a way she’d learned to keep very quiet.

I closed the folder and leaned back in my chair.

The problem with knowing someone’s full history was that it made them impossible to reduce. I had spent a week trying to keep a manageable amount of anger about the things she hadn’t told me, and now I was sitting here with a file full of exactly why she hadn’t told me and I couldn’t hold onto the anger anymore.

It kept turning into something else.

My phone buzzed on the desk.

I glanced at it.

It was Marlo.

Marlo: She’s still at Zara’s. Thought you should know.

I stared at that message for a long time.

The thing about Mira being at Zara’s was that Marlo knew because he was talking to Zara, which meant that door was still open if I needed it. And the thing about Ace was that he’d been raised in the same circles as the rest of us, he knew where Zara lived, and he had feelings for Mira that he had never been particularly subtle about in the moments I’d been paying attention.

I put the phone face down on the desk.

Don’t, I told myself. You don’t have the full picture yet. Wait for Reeves and get the full picture first. That’s the sensible thing to do.

I turned the phone back over, stared at Marlo’s message again then typed back three words.

Me: Is she okay?

His reply came fast.

Marlo: Physically? Probably. Otherwise? I genuinely don’t know man.

I read that twice.

Physically probably was doing a lot of work in that sentence and something about it sat wrong with me, needling at the edge of my thoughts in a way I couldn’t quite place.

I put the phone down again and pulled the folder back toward me, then started from the beginning.

This time I was looking for something specific, some thread I’d missed on the first pass, something that connected the pieces in a way that explained the look on her face the night she’d said no to the ring, not just the fear but the specific quality of it, like someone counting down to something she hadn’t shared with anyone.

An hour later I was still looking.

And I was starting to think whatever it was, my father’s file didn’t have it.

Which meant Reeves needed to find it.

I picked up my phone and sent him one additional instruction.

Me: Medical records are the priority.

Mira was hiding something more. I could feel it.