It was Levi.
I drew in a breath that didn’t quite make it all the way down, unlocked the screen, and hit the call button.
It rang twice.
“Emerson.” His voice snapped down the line like a rubber band—sharp, wired, already three coffees ahead of me. “You’re alive. That’s a good start.”
“Wow, thanks,” I said, aiming for dry and landing somewhere in the vicinity of shaky.
“I’ve been watching my inbox for updates that never came,” he said. “Tell me you’ve been too busy breaking the story of the year to send email, and not that you went to Charleston, fell in love with the moss, and forgot you work for a living.”
I swallowed a hysterical laugh. If only it were the moss.
“I’ve been working,” I said. “Just … not at a laptop.”
There was a beat of silence as he recalibrated, mentally picturing me somewhere dangerous. I’d built a career on sending dispatches from chaotic places—war zones, failed states, cities on fire. Charleston did not fit the brand.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Talk to me. Dominion Hall. The mysterious men. Do we have something?”
My gaze drifted up the lawn to the house—white columns, wide veranda, the whole Southern gothic fantasy washed clean with money. From this distance, it looked harmless. Pretty, even.
Inside, there were men with the same last name who’d lied to each other. A resurrected father. A note from someone who knew too much. A network I didn’t have a name for yet.
And Levi.
“We have … threads,” I said carefully. “There’s definitely a story. I just don’t know what shape it is yet.”
Threads. Safe, nonspecific, technically true.
“You flew across a continent on anonymous tips and corporate shells,” he said. “The shape is ‘conspiracy with money.’ That’s the shape. I need to know if it’s solid or if we’re chasing ghosts again.”
Again.
The word lodged under my ribs.
Two years ago, he’d called me from a different time zone with the same tone, asking if the story I’d pitched—the one about contractors off the books, the one I’d gone embedded for—had enough weight to survive the legal department.
It should have. It would have.
Then my embed had been yanked, my access revoked, and all I’d been able to bring home was half a narrative and a vague sense of dread.
The piece that finally ran had been thin, cautious, all hedges and passive voice. Readers could smell that kind of thing. So could board members. So could people who donated to non-profit newsrooms and liked their outrage tidy.
“You’re still rebuilding from what happened,” Derek said now, like he’d reached into my head and plucked the thought out. “We both are. Funders still ask me at events if we’re ‘doing another Afghanistan debacle’ anytime soon. I tell them we learned our lesson. That we don’t go all-in on smoke without fire. So, if I’m going to back you here, Amelia, I need more than threads.”
I’d been prepared for this. Expected it, even.
It still hurt.
“Two years ago, there was fire,” I said quietly. “You know that.”
“What I know,” he said, “is that you came back with half a story and a huge target on your back from people withmore lawyers than we have subscriptions. You were one more anonymous source away from us getting sued into oblivion.”
“And whose fault was that?” I snapped, before I could stop myself. “The people who pulled my clearance, or the ones who decided we should ‘wait for a better time’ and then let the whole thing die?”
Silence hummed on the line—a warning tone.
“Careful,” he said.
