"I want you to bathe her in our tub.

Alejandro kept his eyes on me while he listened.

I watched his face for any shift — any tightening around the eyes, any change in the set of his jaw.

He was good at this.

Fifteen years of negotiating construction contracts across Chicago had made him very good at this.

But I knew his face better than anyone, and I saw the moment something Holt said landed differently than the rest.

"That's a generous offer," Alejandro said.

"I'll need to review the terms before I respond." A pause.

"Of course.

End of the week." Another pause.

"I appreciate the call, Rowan."

He set the phone down.

"He wants to acquire three of my south side properties," Alejandro said.

"Including the one with the disputed title.

He's offering fifteen percent above market."

"He knows," I said.

"He suspects.

If he knew for certain, he wouldn't be offering money.

He'd be doing something else." Alejandro picked up his phone again and scrolled to a contact.

"I need to call our attorney."

"Alejandro." I waited until he looked at me.

"If Holt was responsible for what happened to my mother — if he deliberately—" I stopped.

"We can't let him buy his way out of this with a property deal."

"I have no intention of letting him do anything," Alejandro said.

"But I need to know exactly what we have before I move." He looked at Lucy.

"I know this is a great deal to ask.

But I need you to speak with our attorney today.

Everything you remember — the argument, the voice, the feeling of being followed.

All of it."

Lucy sat very straight.

"I'll tell him everything I have."

"And I need to make one more call," Alejandro said.

"To the investigator who traced your path through the system.

He found documentation at every step — intake records, transfer records, facility logs.

Twenty years of paper trail." He paused.

"If Holt had any hand in making sure you stayed lost, there may be a record of it somewhere.

These things leave marks."

"People like Holt are careful," I said.

"Careful people still make mistakes when they think the problem has already been solved." He met my eyes.

"He thought she was gone.

He's had twenty years to stop being careful about this particular thing."

The attorney arrived within the hour.

His name was Gerald Marsh — a compact, precise man in his sixties who had handled Alejandro's legal affairs for over a decade.

He sat across from Lucy at the dining room table with a yellow legal pad and asked his questions methodically, without drama, writing everything down in a small, even hand.

I sat beside Lucy.

I didn't speak unless she asked me something.

This was her account to give.

She gave it steadily.

The argument.

The voice.

The name Rowan Holt and the way her body responded to it before her mind could explain why.

The construction site.

The gap in her memory and everything that came after — the decades of moving through shelters and stations and temporary beds, always with the sense that she had left something behind that she couldn't name.

Gerald Marsh wrote it all down.

When she finished, he set his pen on the pad and looked at Alejandro.

"The unauthorized land transfer is already a civil matter," he said.

"If we can establish that Elena Vasquez — your mother-in-law — was in possession of evidence related to that transfer at the time of her injury, and that the injury was not accidental, we are in different territory entirely."

"How different?" Alejandro asked.

"Criminal territory." Gerald looked at his notes.

"I want to bring in a private forensic investigator to go over the original incident records from twenty years ago.

County would have filed a report when she was brought in.

There may be witness statements we don't know about.

And I want to subpoena Holt's acquisition records for that property — specifically any communications from the period immediately before and after the incident."

"He'll fight the subpoena," Alejandro said.

"He will.

Which tells us something." Gerald closed his legal pad.

"Don't respond to his property offer yet.

Don't decline it either.

Keep him uncertain about what you know."

After Gerald left, the house was quiet again.

Lucy was still at the dining room table, looking at the legal pad Gerald had left behind — a copy of her own account, written out in someone else's careful hand.

"I spent twenty years not knowing who I was," she said.

"Now someone is writing it down."

I sat down beside her.

"How are you feeling?" I asked.

She considered the question seriously, the way she considered everything.

"Like something that was buried is finally being dug up," she said.

"It's frightening.

But it's also—" She paused.

"It's also a relief.

To know it was real.

That I had a life.

That I had a daughter." She looked at me.

"That she found me."

I took her hand.

This time she didn't pull back.

From the hallway, Alejandro's voice reached us — low, focused, already on another call.

Building the case piece by piece, the way he built everything: methodically, without fanfare, with the quiet certainty of a man who intended to finish what he had started.

But that night, after Lucy was settled and the house was dark, my phone lit up with a message from an unknown number.