And yet.
My phone buzzed. Daniel.
Rumors escalating. Three board members requesting emergency meeting. Anonymous leak gaining traction — major outlets preparing coverage.
I typed back: Handle the board. I’m dealing with something else.
Something else. As if she could be reduced to that.
The penthouse felt wrong tonight in a way it never had before. Too large. Too quiet. Too full of the specific absence ofsomeone who’d only been here twice and briefly — once to drop off documents, once when we’d ordered food at the conference table and ended up arguing about city infrastructure until two in the morning — but who had somehow managed to leave the shape of herself in the silence anyway.
I checked my watch. Rolled my signet ring. Checked my phone.
Nothing.
I was reaching for it again when the elevator chimed.
Every muscle in my body went still.
Only three people had access to my private elevator at this hour. Daniel. My head of security. And one other person, whom I’d added to the access list three weeks ago without examining too carefully why.
Emilia stepped into the penthouse.
The air left my lungs in a way that had nothing to do with surprise.
She looked exhausted. Dark circles under her hazel eyes, her hair escaping its bun in tangled waves around her shoulders, her leather jacket worn at the elbows. She clutched a folder against her chest like a shield, and she was looking at me with an expression that was equal parts resolve and something rawer underneath — the expression of a woman who’d ridden the L for an hour working through her pride and arrived at a decision on the other side of it.
“Your assistant told me where to find you,” she said. Her voice was flat with the particular flatness of someone managing a great deal beneath the surface. “We need to talk.”
“You could have called.”
“You would have tried to talk me out of coming.”
She wasn’t wrong.
I crossed toward her, stopping close enough to catch her scent — floral shampoo and the sharper edge of a night spentunder pressure — and searched her face for the thing that mattered most. “Are you safe?”
“For now.” She held up the folder. “I found something. About you.”
The words landed like a fist to the sternum.
“What kind of something?”
She moved past me toward the windows, putting distance between us with the deliberateness of someone who needed it to think clearly. I let her have it. I knew by now what it meant when she put space between us — not retreat, just calibration.
“Someone contacted me tonight,” she said. “Anonymous email with attachments. Old newspaper clippings, court records, police reports.” She turned to face me, and her expression wasn’t what I’d braced for. Not judgment. Something more careful. “From before Lake Forest.”
Ice spread through my veins.
“Before Lake Forest,” I said. Not a question.
“Before Lake Forest.” She opened the folder and spread the documents across my coffee table with the precision she brought to everything — methodical, respectful somehow, like she understood she was handling something fragile. “There are implications here, Sebastian. Stories about a family in a neighborhood not unlike Logan Square. About a father who drank too much and a mother who ended up in the hospital more than once.”
My hand found the back of the couch. I hadn’t spoken about this to anyone — not therapists, not board members, not the handful of people who’d been close enough over the years to wonder.
“About a seventeen-year-old boy,” Emilia continued, her voice quieter now, the investigative precision softening at the edges, “who tried to stop his father one night. And couldn’t.”
“Where did you get this?”
