"Yeah," I said. "I know."
I went back to work. Spent the rest of the day on the job site doing what I was supposed to do, being where I was supposed to be, trying to be useful in the hours I had before seven o'clock.
It was harder than it sounds, knowing what was coming.
And easier, too. Because for the first time in weeks, I wasn't running in any direction.
I stood still and waited to see if I was brave enough for what came next.
TWENTY-SIX
NADIA
The community hall parking lot was fuller than I'd expected.
I was reaching into the van for my bag when somebody said my name from the shadow beside it. Jen. Three years of working every event at my elbow, and I almost didn't recognize her. She'd lost weight, and she was holding her keys in both hands like she needed something to do with them.
"I'm not going in there until you've heard it from me first," she said. "Then you can decide whether I'm allowed inside."
I waited. Silence had always gotten me more truth than questions.
"Within days of my starting, a man from their regional operations took me for coffee. Greg. Friendly. Said the company likes to understand the markets it enters, and since I knew the local scene, could I pull together some background. Venue schedules. Layouts. Which kitchens the local operators use, where the service entrances are, who supplies whom."
Her knuckles had gone white around the keys. "It sounded like market research. I told myself it was market research. I sent him everything I knew, which..." Her voice thinned. "Which was everything, Nadia. Three years of everything."
The figure on the footage, moving down a kitchen corridor it had no reason to know. Finding the right panel without hesitating. Forty seconds, entry to exit.
"The Peterson dinner," I said.
“I heard about the fridge two days after, and I knew. Knew I'd been played for a fool.” Jen's voice cracked on the last word. “So I went looking for something I could bring you. An email, a text, anything.”
She shook her head once. "But there was nothing. He asked me in a parking lot, holding two coffees and smiling. Nothing in writing. I quit Elevate on Monday, and even my resignation letter reads like I left over scheduling. The only person holding anything is me."
Of course. That was the whole design. You couldn't subpoena a friendly man with two coffees. The anger was there, and the grief came right behind it, three years of working hip to hip in hot kitchens. I gave myself one breath to feel both before I put them where they belonged for the next two hours.
"Will you say it in there, Jen?" I asked. "All of it. The coffee, the smiling man, nothing in writing."
Jen's chin came up, and for a second she looked like my lead server again.
"Yes."
"Then you're allowed inside."
Kelly met me at the door with a tablet and the expression she wore when she'd been organizing things without being asked. "Fourteen businesses confirmed. Three more who said maybe and then showed up." She fell into step beside me. "Skye's here. Daisy. The venue coordinator who worked on the Peterson dinner. Even the guy from the rental company who never comes to anything."
"Elevate?"
"Two of them. Back table. They've been quiet so far."
I looked across the room. Round tables, maybe sixty people, a mix of the curious and the wary who showed up when a small town sensed something was wrong. The Elevate representatives were easy to spot. Suits, laptops, the careful neutrality of people accustomed to being the most prepared in the room.
Samantha Morrison wasn't one of them. She'd sent associates. Which told me something.
I found a seat near the front and set up my tablet. Kelly sat beside me and pulled up the presentation we'd built that afternoon. Three hours of work, clean and factual, built from the material Chase and Cole had carried into my kitchen that morning. Filings, correspondence, two recorded phone calls from an operator in Durango who, in Cole's phrase, kept receipts like other people keep grudges. Chase had been careful about where it had all come from, which told me he'd dug for some of it.
The pattern spoke without a source needed.
Three markets, three years, the same playbook line by line, with Coogan's Break shaping up as the fourth. Rachel, the venue coordinator from the Peterson dinner, who it turned out had spent eight years as a prosecutor before opening her business, had read the legal framing through and pronounced it sound.
