I push the thought aside and reach for my phone on the nightstand. Seven thirty on a Saturday morning, too early to be useful but too late to fall back asleep.
The confrontation with Whitmore plays back in sharper detail than the stranger in the hallway, and I allow myself a brief flicker of satisfaction. He’ll send those corrected reports. Men that age always do when you give them an exit that preserves their dignity.
Ethan would have laughed at that. He never cared about preserving anyone’s dignity, especially not donors who lied on compliance forms. He’d have written the whole thing up with receipts attached and published it before Whitmore finished his second scotch.
The thought of my brother pulls me upright, the familiar ache settling heavy in my chest. Eighteen months since the accident, and the house still smells faintly of his aftershave when I visit.
Mom couldn’t bring herself to clear out his things before she moved to Arizona, so it all sits there waiting: clothes in the closet, books stacked on the desk, a life interrupted mid-sentence.
I shower quickly, pull my hair into a ponytail, and dress in jeans and an old NYU sweatshirt that used to be Ethan’s. It hangs loose on me, the cuffs frayed from years of wear. I grab my keys and head out before I can talk myself into putting this off another week.
The drive to the house takes forty minutes through weekend traffic that hasn’t decided whether to be light or unbearable. I pull into the driveway just after nine, the lawn overgrown enough to make the neighbors notice but not enough to warrant complaints. The key sticks in the lock the way it always has, and I shoulder the door open into the dim entryway that still holds the ghost of family dinners and arguments about curfews.
Everything is exactly where we left it. Mom’s attempt at packing resulted in three boxes stacked near the front closet, contents unknown and half-applied tape. I step over them and head upstairs to Ethan’s room.
His desk sits beneath the window overlooking the backyard, papers still scattered across the surface in organized chaos only he understood. I’ve been coming here in stages, sorting through files and notebooks, trying to decide what matters and what’s just the debris of an unfinished career. Most of it is mundane—interview notes, article drafts, research on campaign finance laws that went nowhere.
Three weeks ago, I found something that made me stop.
A hollowed-out book on his shelf.The Federalist Papers, spine cracked and pages glued together to form a cavity. Inside: a small brass key attached to a slip of paper with an address written in Ethan’s handwriting.
I’d stared at it for twenty minutes before putting it back and leaving. The idea of following that thread felt too much like digging up a grave I wasn’t ready to disturb.
Today, I’m ready.
I pull the book down from the shelf, the key cold against my palm. The address is for a storage facility in Queens. I tuck the key into my pocket, lock the house behind me, and drive.
***
The storage facility squats off a service road near the industrial waterfront, chain-link fencing and roll-up metal doors stretching in numbered rows.
I check in at the front office with a bored attendant who barely glances at the rental agreement I forged using Ethan’s alias, something he set up years ago for freelance work that needed separation from his byline.
Unit 237 is in the back corner, shielded from the main road by two larger units. I unlock the padlock and roll the door up with a metallic screech that echoes across the empty lot.
Inside, the space is small and cramped, lit by a single overhead bulb. Four banker’s boxes sit stacked against the back wall, labeled in Ethan’s blocky handwriting:Campaign Outreach. Media Research. Donor Analysis. Archive—Misc.
I pull the first box down and pry the lid open.
Papers. There are dozens of them, organized into folders with color-coded tabs. I flip through the first few—printouts of campaign contribution reports, spreadsheets tracking advertising expenditures, notes scribbled in margins highlighting inconsistencies. Standard investigative work, the kind Ethan did regularly for stories that never quite landed.
Beneath the surface layer, things get stranger.
There are encrypted USB drives taped inside manila folders, and printed emails with sender addresses redacted. A hand-drawn map connecting corporate names through a web ofsubsidiaries and shell companies, arrows tracing money flows that loop back on themselves in ways that make my head spin.
I carry all four boxes to my car, my pulse quickening with something that feels uncomfortably close to fear.
Back at my apartment, I spread the contents across my living room floor and start sorting. The encrypted drives are the priority, but I need the password to unlock them. Ethan was careful about digital security—too careful to leave something this important accessible without a key.
I dig through the miscellaneous files, searching for patterns. There’s a folder labeledPersonal—Keep, which feels deliberately sentimental in a way that doesn’t match the rest of his work. Inside: a photocopy of our childhood dog’s veterinary records. Bailey, a golden retriever we had for twelve years before she passed when I was sixteen.
The name hits me immediately. Ethan used variations of Bailey’s name for everything—email recovery questions, bank PINs, the password to his laptop after Mom made him add security.
I plug the first USB drive into my computer and type:Bailey2001.
The drive unlocks.
Files populate the screen in rapid succession: PDFs, spreadsheets, scanned documents. I open the first one—a campaign contribution report for Senator Harlow’s re-election fund—and start reading.
