Chapter 34 #2
When the meeting breaks, Delgado catches me in the hallway.
“You look…normal,” she says.
It isn’t a compliment.
It’s a test.
“I am normal,” I reply.
Her mouth twitches. “Liar.”
I let myself exhale. “I’m functional.”
“That’s closer.”
She watches me a beat longer. “You did good work.”
It lands unexpectedly—not because I doubt it, but because it’s rare to hear it said without caveat. Without someone trying to benefit.
“Thank you,” I say.
Delgado nods once, then turns away, already moving on to the next fire.
Hanford doesn’t speak to me again. She doesn’t need to. Her acknowledgment was procedural. Her apology, if it exists, will come in the form of resources and signatures and files moved from suppressed drawers back into active hands.
That’s how she speaks.
On the way back to my office, I cross paths with Shonda.
“I’m late to a meeting. But…lunch tomorrow?”
That should work, but if something comes up, Shonda will understand. I nod.
She’s called several times. Stopped by my house with wine—apologized for blowing off my concerns. And she’s a fan of Gabe’s. But says she’d like him better if he had a single brother.
I return to my office and close the door.
The quiet inside is different now. Not safe—this building will never be safe the way a home can be safe—but clearer. Less distorted.
Details have unfolded about Michael Harridan that weren’t shared in the room.
He agreed to intimidate me. He claims he didn’t know I would be on a freeway after my brake line was cut—and that’s likely the truth.
Most of the time I drive straight home from the parking garage at the office.
When I survived, he was dismayed I didn’t back down.
The drive-by shooter was instructed to scare me, not hit me.
Everything he did was an attempt to intimidate—in exchange for payment to be made via a sale on property he owns at a higher than market value price.
He claims he believed Project Safe Passage was a dead end anyway.
He had the same gripes many civil servants do—not paid adequately for his time, an opportunity to earn his worth.
He claims he had nothing to do with hiring an assassin—a claim that’s difficult to square with the fact that he confessed to writing the note meant to explain my death, an admission he apparently doesn’t see as contradicting the first. He says he wrote it with the understanding he wouldn’t be contacted again about the matter. That matter, of course, being me.
Whether a jury buys the distinction he’s drawing—present for the plan, absent from its execution—will be someone else’s problem to argue. Prosecution’s job will be making sure the distinction matters less than he thinks it does.
On my desk, I set down a folder I carried with me to the briefing.
MOROZOVA, LINA — ORIGINAL.
The old file.
The one that started this.
The one I refused to bury even when everyone else treated it like paperwork that had outlived its usefulness.
I open the bottom drawer and slide it into the active section.
Not hidden.
Not archived.
Active.
The motion is small, almost nothing. A file placed in a drawer.
But my throat tightens anyway.
Because Lina is not a headline. She is not a talking point. She is not a statistic in a memo.
She is a woman who whispered her story to me and asked, with a kind of hope that should have been honored, if it would matter.
I put my palm flat over the folder.
“I didn’t forget,” I say quietly to no one. “I’ll never forget.”
Then I pull a blank document up on my laptop.
The memo I couldn’t finish.
The one I started and stopped because the system had made it clear it didn’t want my voice on record.
At the top, I type the title.
SAFE PASSAGE PROJECT — REACTIVATION MEMO
SUBJECT: MOROZOVA / PATTERN INDICATORS / NEXT STEPS
I type one sentence.
Then another.
The rhythm returns—slow at first, then steadier, the way it always does when I’m doing the thing I was trained to do. The room fades. The hallway noise becomes distant. My mind begins to arrange the world into elements that can be proven.
At some point, the light outside my window shifts.
Some time later, the office around me quiets as people go home.
I don’t notice until I reach for my coffee and find it cold.
My phone vibrates on the desk.
A message.
Gabe
Outside. You want Thai or that salad place you pretend you like?
For a beat, I just stare at the screen.
Not because it’s romantic.
Because it’s mundane.
Because it is the opposite of the life I slipped into—where everything is either threat or proof or strategy.
This is Gabe at the edge of my workday, not asking for a report, and not trying to take the file out of my hands.
Just offering dinner.
Showing up.
I look at the open file on my desk. The active one.
The work is still there.
It will still be there tomorrow.
I close the folder.
Not because I’m done.
Because I’m choosing.
I text him back.
Evie
Thai. And stop calling it pretending.
I gather my bag, shut down my laptop, switch off the desk lamp. The office is dim now, the corridor beyond my door quieter than it’s been in weeks.
Before I leave, I glance once at the drawer where Lina’s file now sits in the active section.
Then I turn the lock.
And I go.
This is what peace looks like for me now. Not stillness. Choosing.