It had been six days since they tried to transfer Remi.
Six days since I watched her fall to her knees in handcuffs, her face pale and wild, her voice lost under the shouting.
Six days since I’d looked Harlan in the eye and felt nothing but betrayal.
I hadn’t seen her since.
Jack swore she was okay. Said she was safe.
But I needed to see her to believe it.
The world had already moved on to the next scandal. We hadn’t.
We were holed up in an abandoned storefront down the block from the clinic, dusty shelves, peeling paint, one flickering overhead light that made everything feel worse than it already was. Jack had commandeered it as our makeshift war room, calling it “neutral ground,” “easier to secure,” and a dozen other things meant to make me feel better about hiding in a space that smelled like old paper and forgotten rain.
I’d let him take the lead. Let him coordinate statements, rally support, and field the hundreds of messages pouring in. Because if I stopped moving, if I gave myself even one minute to think too much about that night, I’d shatter.
This morning, when I walked in, he was already mid-call, pacing the floor, one hand pressed to his temple.
“Two oversight agencies. One internal. One state,” he said into the speakerphone, sharp and clipped. “They’ve opened a file on Sergeant Voss, and her unit’s been flagged for audit.”
He looked up when he saw me, his eyes lit with a kind of restless fire.
“This thing’s got legs, Ava. You realize what this could mean? If this lands, it’s career changing. The kind of win that opens doors.”
Something in my stomach turned cold.
Jack kept going, hands moving as he spoke, feeding off his own momentum. “I mean, I’m not saying I want to leave the city office, but if this goes to trial, and I win? There are people watching. Hell, the AG’s been cleaning house…”
“Jack,” I cut in, softer than I felt. “That’s not why we’re doing this.”
He blinked, thrown for half a second. “No, of course not. I just meant...”
But I was already looking away.
Remi had always said Jack needed to be seen. That he wanted to climb so badly, he sometimes forgot to look down.
And for the first time, I understood exactly what she meant.
It wasn’t that he didn’t care. He did.
But ambition has its own kind of gravity.
And sometimes, it swallows everything else.
I left before I said something I couldn’t take back.
The clinic was being put together bit by bit, volunteer by volunteer. But it felt wrong without her here.
Glass dust caught the weak sunlight, glittering like a cruel joke across the floor. And it didn't seem to matter how many times we swept the floor.
Half the file drawers had been overturned, cabinets raided. Someone had ripped papers from clipboards and scattered them like confetti, like our entire existence had been tossed into a storm.
Every intake form. Every log. Every application.
All of it had to be checked and double-checked.
So that’s what I did. Sat cross-legged on the office floor, buried in stacks of paperwork, sorting and re-sorting like my life depended on it. Because maybe it did.
