Chapter 12 - The Card in Her Hand
"No," I told the investigator. "I was home with my son. I can provide my porch footage and phone location, if my lawyer approves the release."
At the interview, I explained that Brielle had sometimes collected donor mail at our office. I had let her borrow my spare access card three weeks earlier. When I asked for it back, she said she'd put it in the kitchen drawer. I had never checked.
Asha retrieved the card audit. The badge used at two fourteen was the spare, not the one in my wallet. On video from our building's parking lot, a woman in a hooded coat entered beside a man carrying a laptop bag. The grainy video showed a woman with Brielle's distinctive limp.
"That alone doesn't identify her," Renee said. "We'll keep checking."
She was right. I didn't need another story that felt true. I needed facts that could survive somebody asking hard questions.
That afternoon I went to Tara's house. Owen sat on the kitchen floor building a cardboard city, complete with roads, bus stops, and tiny folded-paper people.
"Are you going to jail?" he asked without looking up.
"I'm answering questions. That's different."
"Did I get you in trouble?"
I crouched beside him. "People who broke rules got us into trouble. You didn't make the fake report or take the money."
He pushed a cardboard school bus toward a little paper bridge. "Then why does everybody online say I did?"
I couldn't promise strangers would stop being cruel. I told him we were going to talk with the school counselor and stop reading the comments.
As I left, Tara walked me to the porch. "Owen told me he saw a boy with a TrueSpan jacket crying at the greenhouse," she said. "He remembers the name on the jacket."
May you like
It was Eli Vega.
And Tara had a photograph Owen had taken before the wedding.
