Chapter 6 #2
"So we should be looking at the landlords." She looked up. "You think someone in the department is helping them bury these violations?"
"You don't ignore this many reports by accident."
"Payoffs?"
"That's my guess. Three names keep showing up on the inspection reports. Different properties, different years, same signatures approving buildings that should've been condemned. I just can't prove the money trail yet."
She sat back. Looked at the map again. Then at my documentation. Then at me.
"So we have landlords bribing officials to ignore deadly violations. And now someone is burning down their buildings." She tapped her pen against her knee. "The question is why. Why these buildings? Why now?"
"Revenge is the obvious answer. Someone who got hurt by the negligence. Lost property. Lost family."
"That's a long list. These landlords have been operating for years."
"Which means our arsonist has been waiting. Planning." I leaned forward, elbows on my knees.
"Someone with inside knowledge."
"Or someone who's done their homework."
Sloane was deep in the documents now. That laser focus I remembered from years ago. When she worked, the rest of the world disappeared. She'd forget to eat. Forget to sleep. Forget everything except the thread she was pulling.
I used to love watching her work. Used to bring her coffee at midnight and leave it on her desk without interrupting, just so she'd have something warm when she finally surfaced.
I pulled up the delivery app on my phone.
Twenty minutes later, the food arrived.
Sloane looked up when I set the containers on the coffee table, pushing aside papers to make room.
Pad Thai with extra peanuts. Green Curry, mild.
She went still.
"Eat." It was all I could manage.
She smiled, small, surprised, and picked up the box I'd laid in front of her.
We ate surrounded by evidence of systemic corruption, and for a little while, it almost felt normal. Easy.
Like the eight years between us were just a pause, a held breath, not an ending.
She laughed at something I said about Rodriguez's ongoing war with the budget office. That surprised laugh—the one that escaped before she could catch it.
The sound cracked something open in my chest.
Dangerous. This is dangerous.
The files blurred in front of me. The fire patterns. The ownership records. The web of corruption that stretched from Queens landlords to City Hall.
The files blurred in front of me.
She'd tucked the pen behind her ear again. That thing she did when the connections were coming faster than her hand could write. I used to pull it out and hand her a fresh one just to watch her blink back to the world.
She looked like she belonged here.
I turned back to the documents before that thought could finish becoming something.
Stop.
I pulled myself back. Focused on the documents. On the case. On the professional partnership that was absolutely not an excuse to sit beside a woman I'd never learned how to stop wanting.
"This connection here." Sloane tapped a highlighted section, voice shifting back to business. "The shell company that owns these three properties also shows up in the city's deferred maintenance program. They're collecting tax breaks for 'affordable housing' while letting the buildings rot."
"Double dipping. Profit on both ends."
"And when something goes wrong—a fire, a collapse, someone gets hurt—they dissolve the shell company and walk away clean." She shook her head. "This is bigger than a few bad landlords. This is a system."
She fell quiet, staring at the web of connections we'd mapped across my coffee table.
I watched her think, the way her fingers traced invisible lines between documents, the slight furrow of her brow, the way she bit the corner of her lip when something didn't quite fit.
I used to tease her about that. You're going to chew right through if you're not careful. She'd swat my hand away and keep working, and I'd kiss the spot she'd chewed just to watch her lose her train of thought.
"We need to cross-reference the arson targets with tenant complaints," she said. "Anyone who filed grievances, anyone who tried to fight back. If our arsonist is motivated by revenge, they might have left a trail."
"I can pull incident reports from the last five years. Fires, injuries, near-misses in any of these properties."
"And I'll dig into the owners. Campaign contributions, political connections, anyone in City Hall who might be protecting them."
We worked for another hour, building connections, mapping the web. By eleven, we had a working theory and a list of follow-up questions that would take weeks to answer.
Sloane gathered her notes. Slid them into her messenger bag.
"Same time tomorrow?"
"If you want."
"I want."
The words hung in the air between us. Too simple to mean what they sounded like. Too loaded to mean anything else.
She paused at the door. Hand on the frame. Not quite looking at me.
"Garrett."
"Yeah?"
A breath. Two.
Whatever she was going to say, she swallowed it.
"Good Thai."
"I know a place."
The ghost of a smile. Then she was gone, her footsteps fading down the hallway, leaving me alone in an apartment that suddenly felt too quiet.
I stood at the window for a long time after she left.
The city sprawled beneath me. All light and shadow. Sirens in the distance and the constant hum of ten million lives happening at once.
Somewhere out there, an arsonist was planning their next fire. Somewhere out there, corrupt officials were signing off on death traps. Somewhere out there, the machine kept grinding, indifferent to the bodies it consumed.
And here, in this apartment, I was thinking about Sloane Harper.
About the way she'd looked sitting on my couch with files spread around her. The pen was tucked behind her ear. The surprised laugh that slipped out before she could catch it.
I thought about what it would be like to have this every night. Dinner at the coffee table. Case files between us. Working together, building something together. Falling asleep on the couch while she kept chasing leads, waking up to find her curled against my shoulder with her laptop still open.
The fantasy was vivid enough to hurt.
She'd left once. Disappeared into silence for years while I waited by a phone that never rang. Wrote letters that were never answered.
Loved someone who'd decided she didn't want to be loved anymore.
I survived that. Barely.
Built myself back brick by brick, wall by wall, until I was something functional again. Something that could work and laugh and even date occasionally, even if none of it ever filled the hollow space she'd carved out when she left.
Now she was back. And all those walls felt dangerously thin.
Guard your heart, Stone. She's not yours anymore.
I turned away from the window. Washed the Thai containers. Put away the files. Went through the motions of closing down for the night.
But when I lay down in the dark, I could still smell her. Still hear her laugh.
Still feel the weight of her presence.
My apartment had never felt this quiet.
Or this full of possibility.