The same name that’s on the shell company contracts and the audit denial is on the property transfer documents. The same confident, unhurried signature. The properties were purchased through the same shell companies that drained the infrastructure fund, allowing for properties to be bought cheap, probably earmarked for development deals that would have made certain people very rich. Then Rothwell collapsed, and the owners couldn’t surface to claim what they’d stolen without exposing how they’d paid for it. So the buildings sat empty. TheRothwell Galleria became the Rot. People like the guys and me moved in.
The corruption that hollowed out Rothwell’s public services and closed Dorothy’s nursing home is the same operation that purchased the ground I’m sitting on. The Rot was built on stolen money. Not metaphorically, but literally. The land deals, the property acquisitions, the legal framework that allows this place to exist, all of it traces back to the same scheme that drained Rothwell’s infrastructure fund.
Everything I’ve built. Everythingwe’vebuilt. The hierarchies, the careful order, all of it sitting on a foundation of the same corruption I’ve spent my adult life despising.
I gather everything, organize it and put it back in the bag. I don’t tell anyone.
Not yet. Because telling someone means saying it out loud, and saying it out loud means it’s real. If it’s real, then the world I’ve been defending isn’t what I thought it was, and I might not be the person I think I am.
That’s a crack I’m not ready to look into.
But the crack is there, thanks to Vi, and her documents confirm it. The nursing home where my mother worked is named in the budget cuts while the Dorothys of Rothwell are unnamed in the margins.
The woman who handed me this bag with a bruise on her temple and her collarbone showing was fucking right.
36
STING
I don’t sleep.I don’t try to. I sit on my bed in the dark and I let everything I’ve read settle. And in the morning, I get up and walk to the communal table for breakfast as if nothing has changed.
But everything has.
Armen is there, already with coffee, both hands wrapped around the mug. He nods when I sit and I nod back. The exchange is automatic. We’ve been doing it forever.
Except this morning, I look at Armen and I think:How much does he know?
He’s been helping Vi, that much I’m sure of, with the gathering of information I chose not to carry out. Now I’m wondering whether he took action without me because he’d already read enough to draw the same conclusions I drew last night. Whether his opinions consist of the same picture I assembled. Whether the reason he didn’t bother arguing with me is that he’d already arrived where I’m arriving now and he knew I’d eventually catch up.
That thought should irritate me but it doesn’t. It falls behind the other things on my mind from the documents I looked over, which far outweigh the irritation of Armen moving on without me and its ding to my stupid pride. I would have done the same.
Like always, Rogue arrives late, dropping into his chair, stealing a piece of bread from Armen’s plate, and grinning when he gets a look that would stop most people cold. That’s how the man rolls. The world could be burning and he’d show up five minutes late with someone else’s food, smiling and optimistic that everything would soon be fine.
I look at him, the ease in his posture, and the way his eyes move to the corridor entrance before he settles, like he’s checking for someone.
Vi and Mara walk in.
The two of them arrive together, mid-conversation, Mara saying something that makes Vi shake her head and smile. Vi’s hair is down, spilling over her shoulders in long, dark waves, different from how she usually wears it pulled back tightly, like a teacher or librarian. She’s wearing the oversized shirt again because most of us in the Rot do not have a closet full of clothes to choose from. It falls off her shoulder in that way that mesmerizes me, and when she sits down at the table, I have to look at my hands for a second and will my erection to behave.
When she reaches across the table for bread, her forearm brushes mine and she throws me a little smile as if to sayexcuse me. It’s brief and incidental and she doesn’t even really register it, but I do. Every one of my nerves in our contact point fires, and the sensation travels up my arm and sits there, warm and persistent, long after she’s forgotten about it.
She doesn’t know I know that her father was clean. I’ll share this with her, just not yet. I’ll tell her how I know the dirty money never touched him, how he traced the corruption to its source, and how the people he was investigating abandoned theirinvestment that later became the Rot. I’ll tell her that where we live exists because stolen money bought the ground it sits on. We only inhabit this place because the thieves couldn’t come back for it.
I know all of this, and I’m sitting across from the woman who’s been trying to tell me it for weeks, and I can’t tell her yet. Not until I’ve decided how to rebuild the parts of my worldview that collapsed last night when I followed the money and found my own address, the address of the old Rothwell Galleria.
Vi’s talking to Mara about their work schedule, just normal, practical conversation. She gestures with her hands when she talks, her fingers long and her wrists narrow.
She looks up, catches my eye across the table, and holds it.
There’s a question in her gaze, the same question I’ve seen her with multiple times.Are you still on the other side of this? Are you still the man who said no, I won’t help?
I look away first. In every exchange we’ve had, every standoff, every time the air between us was thick with tension, I’ve held. That’s what I do. I’m a stubborn fuck.
This morning, I yield.
Not dramatically and certainly not obviously. I just turn my eyes to my coffee and take a sip, letting the moment pass. Rogue says something to Mara, Armen reaches for more bread, and the table continues being a place where people eat breakfast and don’t discuss the elephant in the room.
But Vi notices.
