Chapter 5: What Lena Knew
Three days passed.
Claire went back to work.
She did her twelve-hour shifts, ate vending machine sandwiches at two in the morning, and told no one what had happened on the river walkway — partly because she didn't know how to explain it, and partly because she suspected that explaining it would make it more real in a way she wasn't ready for.
On the fourth morning, she came home to find a man in a dark coat standing outside her apartment building.
He handed her an envelope without speaking.
Inside was a card.
No letterhead.
No logo.
Just a handwritten address and a time — 11 a.m.
— and two words at the bottom.
*Please come.*
The handwriting was Roman's.
She didn't know how she knew that.
She just did.
The address was a building in the Gold Coast — one of those quiet, serious buildings that didn't need to announce what it was.
A doorman let her in without asking her name.
An elevator took her to the fourteenth floor.
A man she hadn't seen before opened the door to a corner apartment and stepped aside.
Ethan was sitting at a kitchen table eating cereal.
He looked up.
"You came," he said.
"I came," Claire said.
"Dad said you might not."
"He said that?"
"He said some people get scared and don't come back." Ethan considered this.
"Are you scared?"
"A little," Claire said honestly.
Ethan nodded like this was the correct answer.
"Me too.
Sometimes."
Roman appeared from a hallway.
He was in a dark sweater instead of a coat, which made him look, for a brief and disorienting moment, like a person who lived somewhere and ate breakfast and had a son who ate cereal.
"Thank you for coming," he said.
"Your note said please."
"It did."
"You don't seem like someone who writes please very often."
"I don't," he said.
"Sit down.
There's coffee."
She sat.
He poured.
Ethan finished his cereal and carried his bowl to the sink with the careful deliberateness of a child who had been taught to do this and took it seriously.
"Ethan," Roman said.
"Give us a few minutes."
Ethan looked at Claire.
"Will you still be here after?"
"Yes," she said.
He seemed satisfied.
He disappeared down the hallway.
Roman sat across from her.
He wrapped both hands around his own mug and looked at the table for a moment.
"Lena talked," he said.
Claire set her coffee down.
"It took most of the first night.
But she talked." He paused.
"She wasn't acting alone."
"Who was she working with?"
"A man named Dario Voss.
He runs a competing operation out of Milwaukee.
He's been trying to find leverage against me for two years." Roman's voice was flat and even, the way a person speaks when they are keeping something very large very controlled.
"Ethan was the leverage."
Claire felt the coffee turn cold in her stomach.
"She was going to—"
"Hand him over.
Not kjll him.
Voss wanted him alive.
A child is more useful alive." He said it the way a man says something he has had to accept in order to function.
"Lena was going to stage it as an accident.
Ethan falls in.
She calls for help.
By the time anyone arrives, Voss's people would have pulled him out on the other side of the bridge."
"But I got there first."
"You got there first."
Claire pressed her hands flat on the table.
"And when that didn't work, she told you I pushed him.
Because if you believed that, you'd—"
"Remove you from the situation.
Yes."
"Remove me," Claire repeated.
"It's a careful word."
"I noticed."
Roman looked up.
"I want you to understand something.
The moment I watched that footage — the moment I saw where Lena was standing and where you were standing — I knew.
I wasn't going to remove you."
"But you didn't tell me that on the walkway."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because I needed to watch her react to the footage.
And I needed to see if you would hold your ground or break." He paused.
"You held your ground."
"I was terrified."
"I know.
You held it anyway."
The apartment was quiet.
From somewhere down the hall came the faint sound of a television — something with cartoon voices.
"What happens to Lena now?" Claire asked.
"She's cooperating with people I trust to handle it correctly.
She'll face consequences that don't involve my direct involvement." He said it carefully.
"I made a decision some time ago about what kind of man I want Ethan to grow up watching."
Claire looked at him.
"That's a careful answer too."
"It's an honest one."
She believed him.
She wasn't sure why, given everything she knew about who he was and what his name meant in this city.
But she believed him.
"There's something else," Roman said.
He reached into the pocket of his sweater and placed a small USB drive on the table between them.
"Lena had a second phone.
It was recovered from her room." He tapped the drive once.
"There are messages on it from Voss.
Operational details.
Names.
Dates.
Locations." He paused.
"Including three other families he's targeted in the past eighteen months."
Claire stared at the drive.
"Why are you showing me this?"
"Because one of the names on that drive is a doctor at Lakeview General," Roman said.
"A man named Harlan Webb.
And Voss has been using him for two years to move something through the hospital that has nothing to do with medicine."
The name landed like a stone.
Claire knew Harlan Webb.
Everyone at Lakeview knew Harlan Webb.
Chief of Cardiology.
Fundraising gala every spring.
His name on a wing of the building.
"You're telling me this because—"
"Because you work there," Roman said.
"And because I think you deserve to know what's been happening in a building where you spend twelve hours a day." He paused.
"And because I need someone inside that building I can trust."
The cartoon voices from down the hall went quiet.
Claire looked at the USB drive sitting on the table between them.
She thought about Harlan Webb's name on the wall of the hospital where she had worked for three years.
She thought about Lena standing on a railing above the river with an eight-year-old boy.
May you like
She thought about twelve seconds.
"Tell me everything," she said.
