This has to be it.
I reach for the Sharpie I brought and uncap it with my teeth, then write the address in tiny block letters on the inside of my forearm. A private airstrip outside Henderson. Time window. The ink bleeds a little where I press too hard, but the letters are legible.
Two days.
That’s not much time. But it’s something. Enough for the Andrettis to move on. Enough to make Restrepo think my father is selling him out if the right people happen to be waiting when the shipment arrives. Enough to crack the alliance before I’m marched down an aisle like livestock.
A small, desperate kind of triumph flickers through me.
I cap the Sharpie. That’s a good lead. Maybe enough on its own. But I’m already here, and the quiet hasn’t broken, and there might be more.
The top two desk drawers give me nothing. Pens, loose ammunition, a legal pad, financial documents bland enough to put me in a coma.
The bottom drawer is locked. Deeper than the others, wide enough for hanging files.
I slide off the chair and kneel, fitting the pins into the lock. This one fights me. My fingers are clumsy with adrenaline, and I have to force myself to slow down, breathe through it, feel for the give in the mechanism instead of just stabbing at it. Every second on my knees in front of this desk is a second closer to someone walking down that hallway.
The lock clicks. The drawer rolls open.
Dozens of folders, organized by year, hanging in neat rows. I start at the front, the most recent. I flip through them quickly, skimming tabs and labels for anything that looks useful. Financial summaries. Property records. Nothing that means anything to me.
I should shut the drawer. I have the airstrip, I have the timeline. Every extra minute is a risk.
But my fingers keep moving through the tabs, and the years keep ticking backward. 2019. 2014. 2008. The files go further than I expected, all the way to the back of the drawer, and I’m about to pull my hand out when a tab catches my eye.
2004
Not relevant. Not what I came for. But my hand stops moving, and something in my chest locks up.
It is probably nothing. An old ledger. Some dead deal. A piece of family business that has nothing to do with me. But that year is a bruise in my life even though I can’t remember it. The year my mother died giving birth to me.
I pull the folder.
There are photographs clipped to typed reports, receipts, notes, a few official-looking documents. At first it’s all too much tomake sense of. Then my gaze catches on a woman’s face, and the world narrows so fast it makes me dizzy.
My mother.
I’ve seen one picture of her in my entire life. One. A single stolen image I’ve looked at so many times I could probably redraw it from memory with my eyes closed. But this is her. There’s no mistaking it. Dark hair loose around her shoulders, chin tilted slightly up, one hand half-raised like she’s about to tuck it behind her ear.
For a second I can’t do anything except stare.
The room goes strange around me, blurred at the edges. My throat tightens so hard it hurts. I touch the corner of the photo with the tip of my finger, careful, absurdly careful, as if I could smudge her out of existence all over again.
She’s outside a hotel in oversized sunglasses. In the next photo, she’s stepping through the revolving door.
I look closer at the stone facade, the brass-trimmed glass, the crest worked into the awning.
I know that building. One of the older Andretti hotels downtown.
My skin prickles.
There are more photographs behind it. A whole stack, taken over what looks like weeks or months. She’s entering the lobby. Sitting in a restaurant. Standing on a balcony with the skyline behind her.
I keep going.
In the later photos, she isn’t alone.
A man appears beside her. Tall, dark-haired, well-dressed. In one shot he’s holding a door open for her. In another they’re sitting across from each other at a small table, leaning in too close for it to mean nothing. Then there’s one of them kissing, his hand at her waist, her fingers hooked into his collar like she belongs there.
