Chapter 3
The office had thinned to silence.
Most of the overhead lights were off, leaving only the strip above Serafina's desk humming faintly and casting her paperwork in a tired, yellowed glow. The bullpen beyond was empty—chairs tucked in, monitors dark, the night shift long since pulled to patrol or gone home.
She sat with her jacket draped over the back of her chair and her sleeves rolled to the forearm, pen moving steadily through forms no one would read closely unless they needed to find fault.
Case number. Time of death. Narrative summary.
The words sat flat on the page, stripped of everything they'd carried when they were fresh.
A convenience store on the corner of a quiet block. A robbery gone wrong.
The owner had been fifty-three. Married, two kids—one in high school, one just out of it.
He'd worked the night shift himself because margins were tight and he trusted no one else with the register.
The suspect had come in masked, camera angle bad, face never visible. Gun up too fast. Trigger pulled faster.
Serafina paused, pen hovering above the page.
She'd watched the footage twice already. Grainy, framed too wide—the kind of video that gave people hope right up until it didn't. No clean identifiers. No usable prints. No witnesses who'd seen anything but a blur and a gun.
She wanted to catch him anyway.
The wanting sat behind her ribs like a stone, tired and grinding, and it didn't move when she told it to. She'd seen enough of these cases to know how they ended. File closed. Suspect unknown. Family left with photographs and questions that never lined up into answers.
She finished the paragraph and moved on.
Her phone buzzed against the desk.
She glanced at it without thinking—and froze when she saw the name.
Aria.
Serafina answered immediately. "Hey."
There was a breath on the other end. Shallow. Careful.
"Hey," Aria said.
Her voice was hoarse. Not sick-hoarse, not congestion—it sounded strained. Thin. Like something was pressing on it from inside.
Serafina sat up straighter. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing," Aria said quickly. Too quickly. "I just wanted to check in."
Serafina closed her eyes for half a second and let the lie pass without comment.
"How are you doing," she said. Not a question. A prompt.
"I'm okay." Then, softer: "I think I just pushed it today."
"Pushed what."
A pause. Another careful breath.
The image came instantly, uninvited—the goitre pressing against her sister's throat, the thing they'd been monitoring for months while insurance appeals crawled through bureaucratic machinery that moved at its own pace and answered to no one's urgency.
It had been stable. Benign. Annoying more than dangerous, according to the last update.
Aria was in her third year of pharmacy school now, P3, and she'd insisted on staying enrolled while they waited.
She didn't want to lose momentum, didn't want to defer unless she absolutely had to.
Classes were manageable. The scholarship depended on progress.
Serafina had let it stand because Aria was an adult and because sometimes you had to let people make their own choices, even when those choices sat wrong in your gut.
Her grip tightened on the phone.
"It's gotten worse," she said.
Silence.
Then Aria exhaled, the sound shaky. "A little."
"How much."
Another pause, longer this time, and Serafina waited it out the way she'd wait out a witness who wasn't ready to talk—patient, quiet, making space for the truth to find its way out.
"I'm having trouble breathing," Aria said finally. "Not like, all the time. Just when I lie down. Or if I talk too much."
Serafina's jaw set.
"And swallowing," Aria added, barely audible.
"When did this start."
"A few weeks ago. I didn't want to freak you out."
"You didn't tell your doctor."
"I did. They said to monitor it."
Serafina leaned back in her chair, eyes drifting to the darkened bullpen. Her reflection stared back at her from the black glass of an unused monitor—flat expression, shoulders squared, already moving through the problem the way she moved through every problem. Assess. Prioritize. Act.
"Have you told him?" she asked.
There was a hesitation on the line, just long enough to be answer enough.
"No," Aria said. "I didn't want to worry him."
Serafina closed her eyes.
"Aria."
"He's been doing better," Aria said quickly. "His heart's been stable. I don't want to set him back over something that might still—" She broke off, and when she spoke again her voice had gone soft. "I don't want him panicking."
Serafina pictured it without effort. Different fathers, same mother. Two marriages that hadn't lasted. Their mother gone now, and Serafina's father with her. But Aria's father—Angelo—was still here. A good man. Limited in what he could offer, but present in ways that mattered.
"This isn't something you carry alone," Serafina said.
"I know. I just wanted to get through the semester. I'm already behind on one module, and if I defer now—"
"We'll deal with school," Serafina said. "Breathing comes first."
Another quiet swallow on the other end of the line.
"Okay," Aria said.
"Are you alone right now?"
"Yes."
"Good. Stay upright. Don't lie down."
"Okay."
"I'm coming down tomorrow."
"You don't have to—"
"I'm coming." No room in it this time. "We'll get eyes on it. In person. Together."
There was a pause, and then a small, careful breath that might have been relief or might have been something too tired to name.
"Okay," Aria said quietly.
Serafina ended the call and sat there for a moment longer, the phone still warm in her hand. The paperwork on her desk waited patiently, the way paperwork always did—indifferent to urgency, immune to grief.
For the first time that night, she didn't look back at it.