Page 290 of Wicked Brutal

Another page. Another picture.

Arthur: Are there more?

I look into the box. It’s barely half empty. Jesus.

A lot.

Arthur: Send everything. Do not stop to read it.

So I don’t. Mom feeds me pages and I photograph them and send, photograph and send, and I try to keep my eyes moving past the words instead of into them. It doesn’t work. You can’t help reading a thing like this. Names. Dates. Hotels. Private homes. Young women. Girls. Money written beside some names. Travel beside others. Medication. Drugs. Gifts. Debts. People moved from one place to another like pieces on a board.

Men whose names I know — because Ryan and the others have spent months saying them around kitchen tables and in locked rooms. Men I thought belonged to different nightmares. They don’t. They belong to the same one. They always have.

My hand stops over another page. Celeste. I stare at it. “Mom.”

“Keep going.”

“That’s Celeste.”

“I know.”

I look closer. Travel arrangements. A private event. A property. Names I recognize. And not one word of it has anything to do with a wedding. I grab another page. Her name again. Three pages later, again.

“Victor’s Celeste?”

Mom finally looks at me. “Yes.”

“She’s his wedding planner.”

Mom’s mouth tightens. “She plans more than weddings.”

Cold spreads through me. I take the picture. Send. Next page — Celeste again. Arrangements. Transportation. Rooms. Guests. Women. Everything buried under respectable words that mean nothing at all until they’re sitting beside every other page in this box.

I send those too.

Celeste is all over these.

Arthur: The wedding planner?

Yes.

Arthur: Keep sending.

Mom keeps pulling papers. The picture gets clearer without me having time to read any single piece of it. Pennington. Lucien. Hartley. Reece. Dad. Victor. Celeste. And around all of them — judges, lawyers, police. Money. Drugs. Girls. Travel.

For months, we’ve all been asking the same question. How do these men know one another? Standing over this box, watching my mother’s shaking hands feed me page after page, I finally understand we’ve been asking it wrong. The corruption wasn’t sitting beside everything else. It protected it. The drugs weren’t a separate problem. They controlled it. The money funded it. The connections hid it. Men traded favors and access and people while everyone around them agreed to look the other way.

It was never how do they know one another. It’s what do they do for one another.

And my father’s name is on almost every page.

The front door closes. Mom freezes. So do I.

“No.” It comes out of her like a prayer that already knows it won’t be answered.

She grabs the papers. I take one last picture. Send. She shoves them into the box. I photograph the final page. Send. Footsteps move through the house, unhurried, getting closer. Mom closes the box. Back into the cabinet. Panel pressed flush. Detergent, dryer sheets, cleaning supplies stacked in front — her hands moving faster than I’ve ever seen them, muscle memory, like she’s rehearsed hiding this a hundred times in her head.

I look at my phone.