I could practically see the fingerprints on it.
Carson had been furious at the scene of Willie’s death. Furious I’d challenged him. Furious Rios had challenged him. Furious we’d stood there like we had the right to ask questions.
And now he’d reminded me what power looked like on a small island.
It looked like four PDFs and a condescending smile.
My phone buzzed again—an incoming text—and for one absurd second, I thought it might be Rios. Checking in. Making sure I was eating. Making sure I wasn’t spiraling quietly like he’d accused me of.
But it was just a bank notification.
The man himself was off to his sister’s for family breakfast this morning, which he’d notified me of, even though he had no reason to. I wasn’t his keeper. I didn’t know exactly what I was.
My brain turned over what he’d said yesterday. You’re one of my people.
What the hell did that make us? Friends? Partners? I sure as hell didn’t know, and I didn’t have any means of clarifying that mystery right now.
I set my phone down and pressed my palms to my eyes.
Okay. Fine. If the official channel was blocked, I needed an unofficial one.
A quiet one.
A human one.
I opened the laptop again—more carefully this time, like it might bite—and forwarded the email to a folder labeled FOIA / Hatterwick. Then I copied Barbara Channing’s exact wording into a note, because I was not going to trust my memory when I inevitably decided to fight this later.
And I would fight it.
Just… not by charging headfirst into the island’s one police department and handing Carson a target he could use against people like Rosa.
My fingers hovered over my contacts list.
Devon Washington.
If anyone understood what it looked like when people vanished without paperwork—when “missing” was a privilege granted by whether anyone considered you worth searching for—it was Devon.
He’d built his podcast, Unaccounted, around that exact premise. Shining a light on the cases of the marginalized. Proving they were not forgotten.
He was also three time zones away. Which meant it was early as hell in California.
Devon was an early riser, though. Had been since we met in college. The kind of person who did morning runs and made real breakfasts and somehow still answered crisis calls with his whole heart intact.
I hit call before I could chicken out.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Madden,” he said, voice warm and alert. No grogginess. No irritation. “Okay, baby. You don’t call me at ass o’clock unless something’s wrong.”
I exhaled, a tight laugh scraping out of my throat. “Hi.”
“Nope,” he said gently. “Not ‘hi.’ Talk.”
I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the cool edge of the table. The boat rocked faintly beneath me, a reminder that the world kept moving whether systems worked or not.
“I hit a wall,” I said. “A hard one.”
Devon’s modulated voice was steady. “Start at the beginning. What kind of wall?”
