Chapter 10 - My Father's Signature

The officers searched the property while Moreno questioned Owen. Nobody could yet prove where Mia had been taken, and every passing minute pressed harder against my ribs.

Dad sat beside me in the chapel's empty front row. He looked smaller beneath the chandeliers, as if every light had found a new wrinkle.

"I signed the temporary alarm waiver," he said. "I want you to hear it from me, not from a courtroom."

"You already told me."

"Not all of it."

He took a long breath. "Owen said his contractor needed two hours to replace a defective panel. He showed me paperwork saying the tenants had been relocated. I was consulting after retirement. Money was tight after your mother's treatment. I wanted the fee."

Mom had died two years earlier. We'd kept her last hospital bill folded in a kitchen drawer long after we paid it, as though throwing it away would mean throwing her away too.

"So you took Owen's word?"

"Yes. And when the building burned, I went back through my records. The relocation list was fake. By then the digital authorization had been altered."

"Why didn't you report it?"

His eyes filled. "Because I was afraid I'd be charged. Afraid you'd find out. Afraid I'd lose the only good thing I had left, which was the way you looked at me."

I stared at him. "Rosa's daughter lost her mother. Bernard's family buried him. You were worried about my opinion?"

He did not defend himself.

"I went to Moreno last month," he said. "That's why she's been investigating. I gave her the fee records and the first version of the waiver. I should have done it the morning after the fire."

I wanted to be furious. I was furious. But I also remembered him sitting outside my hospital door all night, refusing to go home.

"You can't protect me by keeping me in the dark," I said.

"I know that now."

His phone buzzed. He held it out with both hands.

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A photograph filled the screen: Mia sitting in a dim room, wrists bound, eyes fierce with fear. Behind her, half-hidden by a metal shelf, was a wall sign I knew.

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