Chapter 129 The First Face I Find

Chapter 129 The First Face I Find
Penny POV

My hands are shaking so bad backstage that I nearly drop my buzzer twice before the final round even starts.

"You've got this," Sarah whispers beside me, squeezing my shoulder. "Remember what you told me freshman year? You said you'd rather lose swinging than never take the shot at all."

I nod, throat too tight to answer, and step out onto the stage when they call our team's name, the bright lights making it hard to pick out faces in the crowd at first. I don't look for them right away. I force myself to focus, breathe, and remember every flashcard, every late-night study session, every reason I decided three days ago not to quit.

The first round goes fast, questions flying, my hand slamming the buzzer on world capitals, historical dates, science vocabulary I've had memorized since sophomore year. I answer four questions correctly in a row, feel something steady and sure settle into my chest, that particular calm that comes from doing something you know you're actually good at.

By the second round, I finally let myself glance up into the crowd during a brief pause, and that's when I see them: Jake, Maren, Lily practically bouncing in her seat with her glittery sign, my mom sitting proud and exhausted beside them. Something in my chest loosens seeing all of them there, exactly like they promised.

Except something's wrong with Jake's face.

He's smiling, clapping along with everyone else, but there's something tight around his eyes, something I recognize instantly from two weeks of watching him force calm onto his features for Lily's sake. He's hiding something. Right now, in the middle of my biggest day, he's sitting there holding something back so he doesn't wreck my focus.

I don't have time to think about it. The moderator calls the third round, and I force myself back into the competition, pushing everything else aside, channeling every ounce of stress from the last two weeks into pure, sharp focus.

The final tiebreaker question comes down to me and one other competitor, a girl from a rival school who's been neck and neck with our team the whole afternoon. The question flashes onto the screen, a complicated math problem wrapped inside a historical context question, the kind of thing designed specifically to trip up anyone whose brain isn't fully present.

Mine is. For this one moment, everything else falls away: the investigation, Jake's family, the mystery man claiming to be my father, the dark car outside my mom's window. It's just me, the question, and every single hour of work I put into getting here.

I hit the buzzer first.

"The answer is 1848," I say, voice steady despite my racing heart, "because that's the year the Seneca Falls Convention took place, which directly correlates to the population statistic referenced in the second half of the question."

Silence stretches for a long, agonizing second while the judges confer.

"Correct," the head judge finally announces, and the auditorium erupts.

I don't even fully process it at first: the noise, the standing team beside me, Sarah throwing her arms around my neck, screaming something I can't quite make out. It takes a few full seconds before the reality actually lands: we won. Regionals. The thing I worked toward for years, the thing I almost quit three days ago, actually happened.

I look up into the crowd immediately, searching, and the first face I find isn't my mom's, isn't Maren's, isn't even Lily jumping up and down with her glittery sign.

It's Jake's.

He's on his feet, cheering louder than anyone in that entire auditorium, both fists in the air, his whole face lit up with something so proud, so completely unguarded, that whatever tension I noticed earlier seems to melt away entirely, replaced with pure, uncomplicated joy just for me.

Something in my chest swells so big it almost hurts, watching him celebrate like this is the only thing that matters in the world right now, like his own family's chaos doesn't exist for these few stolen seconds, like I'm the only thing worth cheering for.

I make my way off stage as fast as I can after the trophy presentation, medal still heavy and unfamiliar around my neck, and Jake meets me halfway, sweeping me straight up into a hug that lifts me clean off my feet.

"You did it," he says into my hair, voice thick. "Penny, you actually did it."

"We did it," I correct, laughing, tears finally slipping free now that the adrenaline's starting to fade. "I couldn't have gotten through the last week without you all showing up like this."

Lily crashes into both of us next, still clutching her slightly crumpled sign, and Maren and my mom aren't far behind, everyone hugging and laughing and celebrating in one big overlapping tangle right there in the middle of the auditorium hallway.

For a few minutes, everything feels perfect. Simple. Like maybe, finally, something in our lives got to go exactly right without any hidden cost attached.

Then I catch it again, that same tightness returning to the corners of Jake's eyes the second the celebration starts winding down, the same thing I noticed from the stage.

"Jake." I pull back slightly, studying his face. "What is it? What aren't you telling me?"

He hesitates, glancing at Lily still chattering excitedly beside us, clearly weighing whether now is the right moment.

"Not here," he says quietly, taking my hand. "Let's step outside for a second."

My stomach drops immediately, all the joy from thirty seconds ago curdling into something colder. We slip away from the group, out into the hallway, and Jake pulls out his phone, hands not quite steady.

"Detective Reyes sent this during your second round," he says, voice low. "I didn't want to say anything until after you finished, but Penny, I can't sit on this any longer."

He turns the screen toward me, and the second the image loads fully, my medal suddenly feels very heavy around my neck, my victory from thirty seconds ago crashing hard against something much darker.

It's Karen. Unconscious. Hospital monitors surrounding her.

"They found her two days ago," Jake says quietly. "Unconscious in her own home. Reyes says she's the second victim she was talking about in that first email. Penny, somebody hurt her. Somebody hurt her right around the same time she showed up on our porch telling us my mother's death might not have been an accident."

The hallway around me feels suddenly very small, my victory shrinking down to almost nothing next to the weight of that photo, and one single terrifying thought crashes through everything else in my head.

If someone was willing to hurt Karen for what she knew, how much danger is everyone else who's been asking the same questions actually in?