25. Liana
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Liana
“Liana, it’s been two nights.” Gina stood in the kitchen doorway with her keys still in her hand. “Can you please get some sleep?”
“I almost have it.” I scrolled down another page, my eyes burning from the screen. “I called Stefan yesterday and asked him to send me some files. The pattern is starting to make sense.”
“What pattern?” She crossed the room and pulled out the chair across from me. “What are you even looking for?”
“Proof.” I turned the laptop so she could see. “You remember what I told Dominic at the compound? About looking for someone who could predict him instead of just someone who knew the routes?”
“You said you walked out without giving him the name.” Gina leaned forward to look at the screen. “Because you wanted him to figure it out himself.”
“I did.” I pulled up the spreadsheet I’d been building for the last forty hours. “But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I called Stefan and asked him to send me everything. Shipping schedules, route changes, timing logs, cell records. All of it.”
“And he just sent it to you?”
“Stefan knows what I can do when I have the right information.” I scrolled to the section I’d flagged. “He didn’t ask questions.”
Gina studied the columns of dates and numbers. Her fingers drummed against the table.
“I don’t know what I’m looking at.”
“Here.” I pointed at a cluster of entries near the bottom. “Every time a Costa shipment went missing, a burner phone pinged a cell tower two blocks from a Grassi property. Every single time. The morning of every hit, the same burner activates, sends a text, and then the shipment disappears.”
Gina’s hand stopped drumming.
“Someone inside was telling Grassi what to hit.”
“Not just what to hit.” I pulled up the photographs.
I had asked Stefan to put a man on her for a week, and he hadn’t asked why.
Angela at a restaurant in Providence. Angela in a parking garage near the harbor.
Angela walking out of a building that traced back through three shell companies to Grassi’s accountant.
“When to hit it. How Dominic would respond. What moves he’d make next. Everything.”
I pushed the laptop toward her and watched her face as she clicked through the photographs.
“It’s her, Gina.” I sat back in my chair and folded my arms across my chest. “It’s Angela.
She didn’t just take my husband’s attention.
She’s been keeping tabs on him for a year, feeding the routes to Grassi long before she ever walked back into Newport.
Every load they lost, she handed over. She played Dominic from the inside, and he sat her in my chair and thanked her for it. ”
Gina’s face went pale. Her hand hovered over the trackpad, frozen.
“She pushed you out.” She looked up at me and pushed the laptop back across the table. “Out of the work, out of every room she walked into. Because you were the only one who would’ve caught her.”
I stared at the photographs on the screen.
“I was.” I closed the laptop slowly. “I did catch her.”
I looked at the stack of evidence on the table. The photographs. The spreadsheets. The timestamps and cell tower pings and burner phone records. The whole shape of the last year laid out in front of me, clear and ugly and impossible to deny.
I had been right.
And being right had cost me my marriage, my work, my place in the family I had helped build for ten years.
“I loved that room.” I heard my own voice go quiet. “That work. That life. And a stranger burned it down.”
Gina reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
“You have to tell him.”
“I know.”
“Tonight.” She squeezed my fingers. “Right now, Liana. You have to call him.”
“I’ll send it all to Stefan tonight.” I pulled my hand back and started gathering the photographs into a folder. “He’ll have it the second he wakes up. But I’m not calling Dominic.”
“This can’t wait until morning.” Gina stood up from her chair. “She’s still in there. Still feeding Grassi information. Every hour you wait is another hour she can do damage.”
“I know that.” I slid the last photograph into the folder and set it on the table between us. “But let me have one night where I’m not the woman who has to save the man who broke me.”
Gina opened her mouth to argue. Then she looked at my face and closed it again.
“Okay.” She sat back down slowly. She stood and bent to kiss the top of my head.
“Get some sleep.” Her hand squeezed my shoulder. “Please. Even just an hour.”
“I’ll try.”
She picked up her bag from the counter and let herself out. I heard her car start in the drive, then fade down Maple Street.
I sat alone at the kitchen table with the folder in front of me. The photographs. The proof. Everything I needed to blow Angela’s operation apart and end Grassi’s war in a single conversation.
I should call him now. I knew that. Gina was right. Every hour mattered.
I folded my arms on the table and rested my head on them. The wood was cool against my forehead. My eyes were burning and my hands were still shaking and I was so tired I could barely think.