Alice’s collection on the left. The second one, which I almost got my ass kicked for, is on the right. Mara’s letters and notes, finally retrieved from her hiding spot outside the Rot, are set up in the center. Three stacks of paper arranged in a half-circle around me while I sit cross-legged on the cold floor with a bruise blooming on my left temple and the gauze Sting taped there.
I picture his hands as he kneeled in front of me, fingers steady, cleaning my cut with a precision that was medical on the surface and for sure something else underneath. How sat back on his heels and looked at me and I could see every word behind his eyes, because the man could not express an emotion if his life depended on it.Next time, you tell me...
That says it all, I figure.
I press my fingertips against the gauze on my temple. It stings like hell, but for some strange reason, I like it.
Focus, dammit.
The second pile is thicker than the first. Thirty-something pages, mostly typed correspondence, some of it on city letterhead, some on plain paper with no identifying marks. This is the stuff Dad couldn’t keep in his office. The copies he made, the records he preserved because he knew the originals would disappear.
And they’re the missing piece.
Where Alice’s papers were a portrait, including memos, emails, and my dad raising concerns through proper channels, this group is the investigation. Dad wasn’t just flagging problems, he was tracing them. Methodically, carefully, with the same boring patience the heron on the city seal is known for. He followed the money through shell companies and phantom construction firms and accounts that existed on paper and nowhere else. He documented every step. Names. Account numbers. Dates. Transfer amounts. The whole ugly architecture of how the town of Rothwell was hollowed out from the inside.
I cross-reference the three different collections. Alice’s papers give me the timeline—when Dad started asking questions, when he was ignored, when his allies turned on him. The second collection gives me the substance—what he found, where the money went, and who moved it. And Mara’s papers, the ones she found in my apartment, give me the personal dimension. Dad’s voice, his fears, and the growing isolation of a man who understood that the people around him had chosen their side, leaving him to dangle in the wind.
Dad found the corruption early. Earlier than Alice’s papers first suggested. The second group of papers, from the shitty side of the Rot, contains a handwritten note dated nearly a year before his first official memo—a rough calculation on the back of a meeting agenda, numbers that didn’t add up, and a question mark in the margin. He’d been watching for months beforehe said anything, gathering info and building a case. He was making sure he had something worth raising before he raised it.
The heron way. Patient. Methodical. Invisible until it strikes.
He struck. And the system struck back. Hard.
My heart flips in my chest when I think how lonely that time must have been for him, and how I was basically oblivious. He didn’t deserve this. Any of it.
I pick up the page I think matters most, consisting of typed correspondence between two city officials—a name I recognize from the council that’s underlined twice on Dad’s handwritten list. The other name I also recognize, but it has no note beside it.
That’s because this person wasn’t a council member or mid-level bureaucrat or even a political ally who turned. It’s the city development officer whose signature appears on both sides of the operation, the shell company contracts and the audit denial. This person was embedded at every level, facilitating the corruption and blocking anyone who tried to trace it.
And according to this letter, this person wasn’t just part of the machine. They built it. The shell companies, the phantom firms, the routing of infrastructure funds into private accounts, all of it traces back to a single point of origin. He may not have masterminded the scheme, but he was certainly the worker bee who built it, recruited the participants, and maintained it for years, until the city’s coffers ran dry. Everyone else including the council members, the allies who turned, and the oversight committee that denied the audits, was operating inside the structure this person created.
Dad found the architect of the operation. And the architect found out Dad was looking.
I set the page down. Nausea creeps up the back of my throat and I consider, for a moment, whether I need to run for the bathroom.
This isn’t what I expected, not exactly. I thought the corruption would be more convoluted and trickier to identify, woven through a web of complicit officials trying to hide their illicit activities. But they were bold and arrogant and barely even bothered covering up their tracks, so certain they were that they had the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted with no consequences.
Except along came my dad.
Dad’s documents tell the story. Thanks to their brashness, he easily drew a straight line from Rothwell’s corruption to the world I’m sitting in right now, in a town that’s down on its luck, in a dead mall with a bruise on my face and three stacks of a dead man’s evidence arranged around me.
I think about Dad in his office, late at night, the heron seal on the city letterhead, his careful handwriting in the margins. He saw all of this and traced it to the source, splitting all the evidence he’d gathered to keep the people he trusted from seeing the complete shape of what he’d found.
He was protecting us. Keeping us out of the blast radius.
The thought hits differently now than it would have a week ago.
Dad kept me out of the blast radius by keeping information from me. Sting tried to keep me out of the blast radius by refusing to help me find it. Different methods, but same instinct. The people who care about me keep deciding that the best way to protect me is to stand between me and the truth.
I keep walking around them and will continue to. Did they really think I’d be satisfied relegated to the back seat?
Not fucking likely.
Maybe that makes me crazy, taking risks I shouldn’t, I don’t know. Mara and me braved the dark, in hostile territory even after Sting’s voice listed everything that could go wrong. Any of his scenarios could have played out. I got lucky, or Maragot tough, or the group we ran into decided we weren’t worth the trouble. Any version of what went down could have ended differently.
But I made it. I’m here. The papers are here. And now, I can see what Dad saw.
The question is what to do with it. I gather everything, organizing it as I go. Three different stories become one, the pieces assembled into something coherent. I slide everything into the plastic bag and press the seal flat.
