Page 12 of You, Only You

"Did you?"

"I told her the basil had it coming. She'd been overwatering it for weeks."

The sound she made was almost a laugh. Almost. It shifted something in the air between us, loosened a thread I hadn't realized was pulled taut. I noticed that too. The almost-laugh. The way it changed her face.

The storage facility loomed ahead: chain-link fences, harsh security lights, rows of identical units stretching into the darkness. I pulled up to the gate and punched in my code. The barrier lifted with a mechanical groan.

"Romantic," Lindsey murmured, eyeing the industrial wasteland. "You really know how to show a girl a good time."

"Wait until you see the inside."

Unit 738 was at the far end of the complex, deliberately chosen for its isolation. I parked, killed the engine, and sat for a moment in the sudden silence. My hand rested on the door handle. I didn't move.

"Second thoughts?" she asked.

"I'm trying to remember the last time I showed anyone this." I stared at the metal door of the unit, its surface scarred andanonymous. "My mother. Two years before she died. She found a notebook. Not even the full scope, just fragments."

"What happened?"

"She looked at me like she didn't know who I was." I could still feel the exact temperature of that kitchen, the angle of light through the window above the sink. "Not angry. Just... like watching someone disappear in real time."

Lindsey was quiet for a moment. "What did she say?"

"She asked me what I'd become." The words tasted stale, rehearsed from years of replaying them. "I didn't have an answer. I'm not sure I do now."

"Maybe that's not the right question." She held my gaze steadily. "Maybe the question isn't what you've become. Maybe it's whether you can live with where it leads."

I didn't have a response to that either. I got out of the car.

The rolling door thundered when I shoved it upward. I hit the light switch, and the fluorescent tubes flickered to life, buzzing overhead.

I stepped aside and let her see.

She didn't speak for a long time. She stood on the threshold, her eyes moving slowly across the space: the banker's boxes in labeled rows, each marked with a name and date. The filing cabinets bolted to the floor. And the wall. Seven years of work mapped in photographs, documents, and red string connecting them in a web that made perfect sense to me and probably looked like the inside of a conspiracy theorist's brain to anyone else.

I waited for the horror. The step backward. The look my mother had given me.

Instead, she walked inside.

She moved past me without a word, drawn toward the wall. Her footsteps were soft on the concrete. She stopped in front of a cluster of documents centered around a photograph I'dstared at more times than I could count: Richard Vance, tenured professor, that goddamn smile.

Next to his photo was another picture. Nicole, eight years ago, before everything. Laughing at something off-camera, her whole face bright.

Lindsey's hand rose, hovering over Nicole's picture without touching it. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible.

"Your sister."

Not a question. A conclusion, arrived through whatever invisible calculus ran constantly behind those green eyes.

"How?" The question escaped before I could stop it. "How do you know about that?"

She turned to face me. No triumph. No satisfaction. Just that relentless clarity that was starting to feel like standing under a spotlight.

"Background check when I took the audit. Standard procedure." She gestured at the wall. "Dismissed complaint against a professor seven years ago. A sister with the same uncommon surname. Separately, data points. Together..." She trailed off.

"That's not public record."

"No. But you'd be amazed at what surfaces when you know which databases to cross-reference." She studied my face, reading things I didn't want visible. "Every person you've destroyed since then. They're connected to similar patterns, aren't they? Not just predators. People who protect predators. Institutions that choose reputation over victims."