Eleven months ago.
I sat back. Stared at the screen until the text blurred.
The timeline assembled itself.
Rebecca and Crane—together before his arrest. He goes to prison, never names her. She's alone with Emma. Three years later, Emma dies in a fire caused by the exact kind of negligence Crane went to prison trying to fight. Rebecca files a lawsuit. Gets nowhere. Assaults the inspector. Goes to prison herself.
The visitor logs confirmed it. The erratic visits after Emma's death—grief spilling into desperation. The clusters and gaps of a woman trying to hold herself together.
Then the visits stopped entirely. Eleven months ago.
Right when the new fires started.
She didn't need him anymore. She had his methods. His knowledge. His mission. And she had something Crane never did.
Nothing left to lose.
The drive home was a blur. Brake lights and horns, Manhattan traffic crawling while my mind raced.
Rebecca Marsh.
A mother who lost everything. Who tried to get justice and got nothing. Who buried an eight-year-old while the landlord who killed her faced zero consequences.
I understood the anger. I'd spent my career chasing that same impulse—the belief that exposing the truth could change things.
But Rebecca had gone further. Past words. Past exposure. All the way to the fire.
I parked outside my building. Sat in the car, hands on the steering wheel.
Something was wrong. Something beyond the case.
My chest felt tight. Breathing took effort.
I made it to my apartment. Locked the door. Dropped my bag.
And then I fell apart.
One moment, I was standing in my kitchen. The next, I was on the floor, back against the cabinets, sobbing so hard my ribs ached.
I didn't understand. I'd written worse stories. Covered more devastating losses. Why was Rebecca Marsh, a woman I'd never met, a mother whose grief had turned to violence, why was she the one who finally broke me?
But I knew. Somewhere underneath the professional distance I'd built, I knew.
A mother who lost her daughter.
A baby I never got to hold.
The future that collapsed on a bathroom floor. Blood everywhere. Garrett's face when he found me.
Being around him again had cracked me open. All those carefully constructed walls, all that distance—gone. He looked at me like he still knew me.
The terrible truth was that he did.
I'd convinced myself the wound was healed. That I'd done the work in DC, the therapy, the medication, the slow reassembly of a person who could function. That I'd moved on.
I hadn't moved on. I'd just gone numb.
And now, on my kitchen floor, I finally let myself feel it.
