Chapter 35
It took a few hours for Cara to notice that Elena had stopped coming out of the bedroom.
Saturday night after Gabe and Wade brought back the Chinese food and the news that the lab was a ghost, Elena had eaten a few bites of fried rice and said she was tired.
Sunday morning she didn’t come out for coffee.
By Sunday afternoon the door to the small bedroom—the one with the fire escape and the hummingbird mural—stayed closed, and when Piper knocked, the voice that answered was thin and flat and far away.
“I’m fine. I just need to rest.”
She wasn’t fine. Elena had been holding herself upright through sheer will since she’d stumbled into their lives on a rain-soaked highway, and the Corvallis results had been the thing that finally cut the wire.
Knowing the name of what had been done to her—knowing it was a product—had finally cut the wire.
Piper sat on the floor outside the closed door for an hour, not speaking, just being there. Tom watched his daughter do this and didn’t stop her.
The argument started at the kitchen table over cold coffee and Tom’s laptops.
It wasn’t a fight. It was worse—the kind of tense, circular conversation that happens when smart, tired people run out of good options and start defending the bad ones.
“We hand it over,” Reagan said. She was standing by the windows, arms crossed, professional to the bone. “We give the drug analysis to the FBI. We give them the shell company records, the shipping invoices, everything Tom’s pulled. Let them build the case.”
“With what?” Tom didn’t look up from his screen.
“We have a compound analysis and a financial trail that dead-ends at Graham’s name.
No medical records. No administration logs.
No proof that Elena was given anything, by anyone, ever.
The FBI gets this package and the first thing they do is call Pacific Crest, and the first person who picks up the phone is Graham Whitfield. ”
“So what’s the alternative?” Reagan’s voice was tight. “We break into a medical facility?”
“We go back,” Wade said from the desk chair. Quiet. Final. “We get what’s on those servers and we bring it out.”
“With what authority?” Reagan turned on him. “Wade, Graham has a missing person’s report with the FBI. He’s described Gabe. He’s described Cara. If any of us show up within fifty miles of that facility—”
“Then we don’t get caught.”
The silence that followed was the sound of six people looking at the distance between what they should do and what they had to do and finding nothing in between.
Gabe leaned against the kitchen counter. He’d been quiet through most of it—the dangerous quiet, the one Cara had learned to read as gears turning behind the badge. “Tom. If you had physical access to Pacific Crest’s network. How long?”
“To pull Elena’s medical records? Twenty minutes. To crack the financial servers and trace the shell companies from inside?” Tom tilted his hand. “Forty. Maybe an hour if their security’s been upgraded since Elena left.”
“And what would you have when you came out?”
“Everything. Dosing schedules. Pirelli’s name on the administration orders.
Internal memos, supply chain records, the works.
And if the financial servers are connected to the same local network—which they usually are in facilities that size—I can trace the shell company payments from the inside. See what the outside walls are hiding.”
Reagan: “You’re talking about breaking into a hospital.”
Tom: “I’m talking about walking into a hospital with someone who knows the layout and sitting at a computer for forty minutes.”
Reagan looked at the closed bedroom door. Everyone did.
No one said Elena’s name. No one had to.
Gabe was watching her. Not the cold distance of the last few days. Something else. Something like the man who’d stood in her bakery kitchen and said he didn’t care what her reasons were.
“So we go back,” Cara said. “We get what’s on those servers. And we finish this.”
Nobody argued. The trumpet player on the corner had gone home.
The Mission was going dark outside the windows, the Sunday crowds thinning out, the city settling into the orange glow of streetlights and restaurant neon.
Somewhere down the block, a church bell rang.
Once. Twice. The kind of sound Cara hadn’t listened for in years.
Lord, I don’t know if I’ve earned the right to ask You for anything. But Elena doesn’t deserve what’s happening to her. Help me help her.