Chapter 10 - The Name We Couldn't Use
I hated the second apartment. It smelled like fresh paint and somebody else's laundry soap. I cried because my toothbrush was gone, and then cried harder because it wasn't really about the toothbrush.
Mom sat on the bathroom floor with me. "We can buy another one," she said.
"I don't want another one. I want our stuff."
"I know."
"I want the old Dad who made pancakes."
She went quiet. "I miss the person I thought he was, too."
We didn't go back to our house. Nina brought a few things investigators had cleared: my stuffed rabbit, Harper's birthday card, and my spelling test. The red A had smudged in the rain. Mom taped it to the new refrigerator anyway.
An agent explained that the blogger had received the old name from an anonymous email, not from a court employee as everyone first feared. Investigators were following its digital trail. I wanted the word anonymous to mean nobody could ever know. Instead it meant somebody knew and hadn't yet been found.
The next day, Mom got permission to speak to a woman she'd once worked with, Tess Ortiz. Tess was Lena's younger sister. Her voice came through the speaker like a familiar song from a room I'd forgotten.
"They finally found the page," Tess said. "Lena would have been furious it took them this long."
Mom smiled through tears. "She always said I overthought everything."
"You did. You still do. But she trusted you."
Tess told us she would cooperate with prosecutors. She'd kept her own records of tenant complaints and fire-alarm outages. It wasn't proof of the crime by itself, but it could show that managers knew people were in danger.
When the call ended, Mom held the silent phone for a long time.
"I thought everybody from back then hated me for surviving," she said.
May you like
Nolan arrived an hour later. He had good news and bad news. The blogger's anonymous email traced to a public-relations agency working for Victor Harlan. But that same lawyer had just filed a motion claiming Sarah had approved one of the very invoices she accused Harlan of falsifying.
Mom went white. "Because I did."
