24. Cali
CALI
It's a Wednesday morning, and everything is normal. Ronan left for the office at seven-thirty. The kids are upstairs. Hayden's building something with the cardboard boxes I was supposed to recycle, and Isabella is playing with dolls in the den.
I'm at the sink in my socks, rinsing syrup off two plates, when the doorbell rings.
I don't jump. Weeks ago, I would've grabbed the knife. But the house has a vault door now, plus a rotating cast of men in dark coats parked at the corner, and somewhere along the way, my body learned to stop flinching at ordinary sounds.
So I dry my hands, go to the door, and open it.
Two men in shabby suits await me. One's older, gray at the temples, holding a leather folder. The other's younger, with a square jaw like a brick.
"Ms. Meadows?" the older one asks.
"That's me."
"FBI." He flips open a badge, quick and practiced. "Agent Hodges. This is Agent McCarty. We have a compelled-production order for materials related to the software developed by your company."
He hands me the folder. I open it—and frown.
Because, first off, it's beautiful.
I mean it. It's the prettiest legal document I've ever held. Crisp letterhead. Case number formatted just right. A judge's signature, a seal, a paragraph of dense language about the codebase and the source repositories and the obligation to produce "all versions, forks, and dependencies."
"This is a lot," I say, buying myself a second.
"It's routine," Agent Hodges says impatiently. "We'd like the materials today. You can hand over a hard drive, or we can walk you through a supervised export."
I keep reading. It's so good that I honestly feel compelled to at least skim every word. Nobody in this whole mess has ever handed me a document this polished on a doorstep at nine in the morning.
But I can feel the clock ticking. These men seem much less concerned with the paperwork or issues of software than they do with getting a toe through this door. They're looking at me. And past me. Into the house.
I reach the end of the page and my frown deepens. Nothing here looks amiss. So why does it feel like something is so wrong?
I think and think and think as the thought burrows deeper like a fishhook in the meat of my thumb.
And then it hits me.
A flash of memory from the past.
It's the badge. Something was wrong with the badges. Agent Hodges flipped his open for exactly one second and then closed it and tucked it away, but I have spent an entire month staring at Gia Mercer's business card until the letters blurred, and I know what a Bureau credential is supposed to say.
The ID number under his photo had too many digits. And it started with a letter. Mercer's card didn't do that. The formatting was wrong.
It's small.
But I can't help feeling like it's meaningful.
"Sorry," I say, pitching my voice bright and dumb and harried, just a frazzled mom in fuzzy socks with syrup on her hands.
"It's just, my youngest is a menace when she's unsupervised and I think I might've left the stove on.
Can you give me one sec? I want to grab my glasses so I can actually read this thing properly. "
Agent Hodges smiles. "Of course. Take your time."
The younger one, McCarty, inclines his weight forward. Toward the threshold.
"Great," I chirp. "One sec. Don't move."
I don't shut the door all the way. I leave it open six inches, because slamming it would tell them I know, and I need them to keep believing I'm exactly the woman they think I am.
Slow. Gullible. A step behind.
I've been underestimated by better men than these two.
I walk to the kitchen at a completely normal pace, my heart fluttering like a trapped bird, and pick up my phone off the counter. I call Ronan—once, twice, three times—but he doesn't answer.
"Dammit."
Plan B it is.
I open the junk drawer, the one with the takeout menus and the dead batteries, and dig past all of it until my fingers close on the thing I've kept there without letting myself think about why.
Two business cards. Identical. Special Agent Gia Mercer. FBI.
The second the dial tone catches, I start whispering. "Agent Mercer, it's Calista Meadows. There are two men on my front steps right now. They say they're FBI and they've got a production order for my software. Are these your people?"
To her credit, Mercer doesn't miss a step. "Describe them," she orders.
"Older one, gray hair, calls himself Hodges. Younger one, big jaw, McCarty. The paperwork is—it's really good, it looks real—"
"I didn't send anyone."
"Are you sure?"
Rapid-fire typing follows on her end. "Yeah, I'm sure.
And… Yeah, that's what I thought. There is no production order out of my office.
Nobody I know should be at your door." More sounds.
A rustle, a door, the hubbub of someone moving quickly.
"Calista. Listen to me. Do not open that door.
Do not hand them anything. Where are your kids? "
"Upstairs."
"Keep them there. Stay on the line with me. I've got people close and I'm moving them in now. Do not hang up."
I press my back against the kitchen island—the same island where I built the worst spreadsheet of my life, and then the second-worst one. There's something almost funny about that, about how every catastrophe of the last three months has found me right here in my socks.
"They're still on the stoop," I whisper. "The door's open."
"Good. Leave it. Do not go back to them."
But I'm already panicking. Because the one thing I know, the one thing that has never once failed me, is that people who want something from you behave differently the moment they realize they aren't getting it.
"Mercer, I'm going to do something."
"Calista—"
I walk back down the hall. Not all the way. I stop ten feet from the door, close enough to be heard, far enough that neither of them can reach me before I could scream the house down.
"Sorry, guys," I call out. "I've got the Bureau on the phone right now. Agent Mercer. She's going to confirm the order and she's sending people over. Should be here in a couple minutes. You're welcome to wait."
The change is instant.
Agent Hodges's pleasant, patient expression doesn't crack so much as evaporate. "That's not necessary, ma'am," he barks. "We can come back."
"I insist," I say. "Stay. She'd love to meet you."
McCarty is hurrying backward off the top step.
Hodges stumbles down after him, keeping his face toward me the whole way like you'd back away from a dog you weren't sure about.
As simple as that, they just fold up and go, down the steps and along the sidewalk, past the corner where one of Ronan's men should be sitting in a dark coat and, I realize with a lurch, isn't.
Then they turn the corner and they're gone.
"They left," I say into the phone. "They're gone. They walked. They didn't run, they just—they left."
"I've got a car ninety seconds out," Mercer says. "Stay inside. Lock the door. Do not touch that paperwork again, I want it exactly as it is."
I go to the door, close it, throw the deadbolt and the vault lock and the chain, all three, and then my legs just quit.
I slide down the door and land on the hardwood in the front hall. For a while, I sit there with my knees against my chest and my phone still pressed to my ear, and I start to shake.
Not cry. Shake. Full-body, teeth-rattling, like the house is running an electric current through me.
"Calista." Mercer's voice, closer to gentle than I've ever heard it. "You still with me?"
"I'm here."
"You did that right. All of it. You hear me? That was exactly right."
"My kids are upstairs," I whisper. Which isn't an answer to anything. It's just the only thought that will hold still long enough for me to say it.
"They're fine. You're safe. My people will be there soon."
But Ronan beats them to me. I don't know if it was the missed calls from me or something from his men that alerted him, but he comes screeching up a few minutes later. He charges through the door and drops down onto his knees on the hardwood in front of me in his good gray suit.
"I'm okay," I promise before he can ask. "I'm okay. The kids never came down. They don't know anything happened."
Then his arms come around me. I let myself fall into them, and he holds me together on the floor of my own front hall.
In a trembling voice, I explain what happened. "They were at the door," I tell his collar. "They had this whole sheet, this beautiful order, it looked so real, they wanted the code, and I almost—" I stop. "But the badge was wrong. The number. It was formatted wrong."
His arms tighten. "I'm sorry I didn't answer."
"It's okay," I promise. "But I panicked, so I… I called Mercer."
He cringes, but he nods. "That's better than letting them take you. It's okay, Cali. Everything's okay."
I pull back enough to look at him. "Ronan, they didn't even seem that bothered. More just… irked. It was like getting caught was just inconvenient."
"You did everything right," he says again.
"Do you understand me? Everything. You saw it, you stalled them, you called the one person who could confirm it, and you got them off your steps without opening the door.
You did that. Not me. Not my men, who I am going to have a very long conversation with. You."
"I was so scared."
"Good." He tips his forehead against mine. "Fear's the correct response. You said the correct thing, and then you were smart anyway. That's the part that keeps you alive."
When she arrives, Mercer takes the folder into evidence in a clear plastic bag, holding it by the corner like it might bite.
She stands in my kitchen while a technician I don't know dusts my doorframe.
She looks at the fake order for a long time, frowning in a new way.
In every previous conversation, she's had this glossy, unbothered nonchalance, the jaded detective who's always got more information than you and enjoys knowing it.
That's gone now.
"This is good work," she scowls, and she doesn't mean it as a compliment. "Case number's live. It maps to a real matter. Judge's signature's a decent forgery. Letterhead's ours." She turns it over. "Somebody had access to real filings to build this. Real formats. They just got one thing wrong."
"The badge number," I say.
She looks up at me. "The badge number. How the hell did you catch that?"
"I stared at your card for a month straight." I shrug. "I don't like not understanding things."
Realization dawns on her face. For the first time, I think she sees me as more than an irritant.
"You told me once you thought there were two investigations," she says slowly. "Real feds and fake ones. Todd's people building a story about how he met Akov. And me, building one about the tool." She sets the bag down on my island. "I thought you were being paranoid."
"And now?"
Mercer looks at the fake order. Then she looks at me. And she drops the mask—not all the way, just an inch, but enough to feel the alliances shifting.
"Now, I'm inclined to agree," she reluctantly admits.
"Somebody sent two men to your door with Bureau letterhead and a story about my investigation to walk out of here with the one piece of software that ties this whole thing together.
They used me to do it." Her jaw grinds. "That just made this personal. "
We stand there, the two of us, on either side of a plastic bag with a beautiful lie inside it.
One more receipt for the pile.
I don't trust her. This hasn't changed that. I've trusted people who felt true before and been wrong in ways that put a bloodstain on my stairs. Everything about Mercer feels true, and everything about Ronan felt true, too, and I've learned my lesson about feels.
But she came in person. She stayed on the line. She told me not to open the door, and she was right, and the men left the second I said her name.
And it is beginning to seem to me that the only sane thing to do in a world full of liars is to figure out which of them wants the same thing I want, and stand near that one.
Mercer wants the person wearing her face.
I want my kids to grow up.
It's not friendship. It's barely an alliance. It's one brick.
But it's a brick nonetheless.
"Okay," I say. "So what do we do about it?"
She looks at me for a long moment. Behind me, in the doorway, I can feel Ronan not saying anything, letting me handle this myself.
"We start," Mercer says, "by you telling me everything you saw. Every detail. In order."
"I'm so glad you asked." I pull out a stool. "I'm good at that part."