Chapter 153 THE STACK

Chapter 153 THE STACK

Joey POV

The papers were multiplying.

He had started with twelve sheets on the first day, the ones they had given him access to as part of what they called the cooperation process — financial summaries, network maps, the kind of documentation they had decided he could see because they had decided he was useful enough to manage rather than simply remove.

They did not know what he was doing with them.

He was copying.

Not photographically — they had taken his phone on the first night, efficiently and without drama, the specific practiced motion of people who had done it before. But he had a pen. He had the papers in front of him for hours at a time. And he had the specific memory of someone who had spent two years building a case from scratch, who knew how to read a financial document and extract what mattered and hold it in his head until he could put it somewhere that was not his head.

He wrote in small, precise letters. On the sheets they gave him, in the margins, between the lines, using the space the documents hadn't used. When he filled a sheet he folded it once and added it to the stack he kept inside the lining of his jacket, accessed through a seam he had opened with the edge of a pen cap on day three.

The jacket was hung on the hook by the door.

It looked like a jacket.

It contained, at current count, thirty-seven pages of handwritten documentation.

He was not cooperating with them.

He was the most cooperative person in the building and he was not cooperating at all.

He looked out the window at the fence line.

The jacket was still there. The green one, the one with the compass rose patch on the left shoulder that Lena had given him for his birthday three years ago, which he had chosen specifically because it was identifiable and specific and the kind of thing that only one person would recognize from a distance.

He had put it on the fence post on his second morning there. He had stood at the window long enough to confirm it was visible from the road. Then he had gone back to the table and the papers.

It was still there.

They had not taken it down, which meant they did not understand what it meant, which meant they had underestimated who was looking.

He had been counting on that too.

He thought about Lena. He thought about her specifically — the way she moved through rooms, the way she read information, the way she had looked at the testament photographs that night with the specific focus of someone who was building something. He had watched her from the edge of their investigation all semester. He had trusted her with the annex text before he trusted anyone else.

He thought about Jasper.

This one was harder. Not because he didn't trust his brother — he did, in the specific complicated way of brothers who were very different and had been put in competition their whole lives and still, underneath all of it, would answer the phone at 3 AM. He trusted Jasper. He just didn't know yet if Jasper had made the decision he needed Jasper to make.

The decision to stop being the good son.

He looked at the fence line.

The jacket was still there.

Someone was coming. He was sure of it. He had built this with enough redundancy that someone was coming — Annabelle with the annex documents, Lena with the coordinates, Jasper with whatever he had found in their father's files. He had laid three separate trails and at least one of them would hold.

He just needed them to wait for the right moment.

He looked at his stack of folded papers, the ones outside the jacket, the ones he kept on the table under the pretense of reviewing the documents they had given him.

He picked up the pen.

He wrote one more entry.

He folded it.

He added it to the stack inside the jacket lining.

He looked at the window.

He thought: not yet.

He thought: but soon.

Author's Note: Lena looked at the coordinates and knew exactly what was three miles from that location and slid the paper back across the table and said keep it safe. Jasper kept it. Joey is at the window with thirty-seven pages inside his jacket lining and a green jacket with a compass rose patch still on the fence post. Three people moving toward each other without knowing it. Not yet. But soon. Drop a like if Joey's chapter just broke your heart a little