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He traffics fake chemo. The same category of drug keeping his own daughter alive, that’s kept thousands of other people alive, faked for something as cheap as money.

I fell in love with him, and what I do, who I am, means nothing to him. I let him inside every wall I had. And Sarah—God, Sarah—takes real medicine while somewhere a person on his supply chain takes chalk.

And methotrexate isn’t just a chemo drug. It’s used to treat several types of arthritis. It can treat lupus, ectopic pregnancy, sarcoidosis, and a number of other conditions that I don’t even know about. It is an old, cheap drug. Why they hell…

Because it’s an old, cheap drug, and no one is looking for anyone to fake it. The new stuff? Sure. New drugs are the hot thing for chemists in this business, because they’re the most expensive, so the markup is huge on their counterfeits. That’s what authorities look for.

Not this.

The repulsion is total, and for one second it burns away everything I’ve built in this house. The meals at Diana’s table, the nights in our bed, the lies I told my brother to keep him safe… All of it, gone to ash in the time it takes to read a formulary sheet.

Repulsion is not a plan. Repulsion is a feeling, and feelings don’t hold up in the rooms I’m about to be standing in.

Evidence is a plan.

I take out my phone. My hands are steady as I take pictures and upload them to the cloud.

The manifests first. Routing codes, container numbers, port stamps. Then the assay sheets, the wrong percentages, the drug names. The third manifest with methotrexate on it gets two frames, one close on the drug name and one wide to show the Sartorre routing beside it. I’m building a chart of a disease, the disease is the man I fake-married, and my thumb does not shake once.

I don’t know what I’ll do with them yet. Insurance, maybe. An exit. Proof that I saw this clearly, before anyone in this house could arrange the story for me the way Allegra warned me they would.

Is she the only person who told me the truth since I got here? How fucked up would that be?

These pictures are the difference between a doctor who was held and a doctor who was complicit.

There’s a sound behind me—not a footstep, just the change in the air a room makes when it stops being empty. My thumb finishes the last frame on reflex.

Then the voice comes from the doorway, quiet, almost gentle, and entirely certain. “You should not be in this room, Doctor.” Nick.

There’s no version of this where he didn’t see exactly what I was doing. He’s standing in the doorway the way he stood at the foot of a hotel bed two months ago, hands loose, patient, professionally sorry. A man who follows orders he doesn’t always want to follow.

Two months ago I thought of Nick as the reluctant one, the man who followed his don’s orders and hated the packing of my suitcase. Standing here now with a phone full of his boss’s crimes, I still don’t know who he really is.

The estate has cameras I’ve stopped noticing, and I let myself forget. I imagine that’s where he saw me first. Which means he knows that I know.

“Nick.” My voice comes out level, which surprises us both again. “I was looking for Sarah’s pharmacy file. Her count’s short.”

“I know what you were looking for.” His eyes go to the open drawer, then the phone, then back to my face, and there’s no anger in him, only a terrible gentleness. “And I know what you found.”

“Nick—”

“Put the phone in your pocket, Doctor. Don’t delete anything. That would insult us both. Just put it away and come with me.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“To Lupo. He’s in his study.” He steps back from the doorway to give me room to pass, either out of courtesy or because he doesn’t want to block an exit that leads nowhere. “He’ll want to hear it from you, not from me.”

A pause. “For what it’s worth, and it’s worth nothing right now, I told him to tell you weeks ago. He kept saying that he would. After—after the war, after it was safe, after he could give it to you whole.”

“Do you genuinely think there are words that make up for what I saw, Nick?”

“No. But I suppose that doesn’t matter anymore.” Something close to grief crosses the man’s face. “There’s no more after, Doctor.”

I put the phone in my pocket and walk out of the office ahead of a man with a gun under his jacket, toward the man I thought I loved. The strange thing is that I’m not afraid of Nick, or of the walk down the hall.

I’m afraid of Lupo’s answer. Of whether the man I trusted is going to look me in the face and defend a drawer full of poisoned children.

If he does—if he stands behind that desk and gives me a reason, a version where this is just business, the way everything is just business—then the last two months were the con Allegra promised. Then the realest thing I ever felt was aimed at a man who kills kids.