"I want you to bathe her in our tub.

"Tell me exactly what you remember," Alejandro said.

He had pulled a chair close and sat forward, elbows on his knees.

I was beside Lucy on the sofa.

The morning light had shifted to the flat white of midday, and the house was quiet in a way that felt deliberate, like it was holding its breath.

"It comes in pieces," Lucy said.

"I've always had pieces.

I just didn't know what they were pieces of." She pressed her fingers together.

"There was an argument.

Before the construction site.

A man — I couldn't see his face clearly, but I knew him.

I was afraid of him." She stopped.

"I was afraid of him before the argument started.

That kind of afraid that means it had happened before."

"Who was he?" I asked.

"I don't know his name.

But I remember his voice.

Low.

Very controlled.

The kind of voice that doesn't need to get loud because it already knows it has won." She looked at her hands.

"He was angry about something I had found out.

Something I wasn't supposed to know."

Alejandro was very still.

"What had you found out?"

"I don't know.

I can feel the shape of it — the weight of knowing something dangerous — but the content is gone." She shook her head.

"What I do remember is that he followed me.

I was walking toward the construction site because it was a shortcut I used.

And then there was a sound behind me, and then nothing."

The word nothing sat in the room.

"You think someone pushed you," I said.

"I think someone made sure I fell," she said.

"And I think they made sure no one was looking when it happened."

Alejandro stood up.

He walked to the window and stood with his back to us for a moment.

When he turned around, his expression had changed.

"The land dispute file," he said.

"The one that started all of this."

"What about it?" I asked.

"The property on the south side — the one with Elena's name on the early deed.

The reason it was flagged was because the chain of title had a gap.

A transfer that happened twenty years ago that the previous owner's estate claimed they never authorized." He looked at Lucy.

"The man who acquired that property during that gap period — his name is Rowan Holt."

Lucy's face didn't change.

But her hands tightened in her lap.

"You know that name," I said.

"I don't know why I know it," she said slowly.

"But yes.

Something in me knows that name."

Alejandro crossed back to the desk and opened his laptop.

He turned it to face us.

A company profile.

A photograph.

A man in his late sixties, silver-haired, square-jawed, standing in front of a building with the easy confidence of someone who had never been told no.

Lucy looked at the photograph for a long time.

"His voice," she said finally.

"I can't see the face from that day.

But the voice — I think it could be him."

"Rowan Holt has been one of Chicago's largest private real estate developers for thirty years," Alejandro said.

"He and my father were competitors.

I've crossed paths with him twice in the last decade.

He is not a man who loses gracefully." He paused.

"And if Elena Vasquez had discovered something about an unauthorized land transfer and was about to expose it—"

"He had a reason," I said.

"He had a very large reason."

I looked at Lucy.

She was still looking at the photograph.

Something had shifted in her expression — not fear exactly, but the particular alertness of someone who has spent twenty years sensing danger without knowing its source and has just, for the first time, seen its face.

"We need to be careful," Alejandro said.

"If Holt finds out that Elena Vasquez is alive and in this house, and that she's beginning to remember—"

His phone rang.

He looked at the screen.

His jaw tightened.

"It's Rowan Holt," he said.

None of us moved.

The phone rang a second time.

A third.

Alejandro picked it up.