Chapter 4: Fourteen Months of Silence
"Who took this?" I asked.
Marsh sat across from me.
The remaining agents had stepped out.
The apartment was quiet in a way that felt deliberate.
"We don't know yet," she said.
"We found it in a secondary file attached to the Solace Group communications.
It was sent to your mother-in-law's private server eight days after you first contacted our office."
I looked at the photograph again.
The timestamp read 11:23 PM.
I was in the lobby of my building, coat on, bag over my shoulder, looking toward the street.
I had no memory of that night specifically.
It was an ordinary Tuesday.
"Someone inside your office told her I came to you," I said.
Marsh didn't answer immediately.
"We're investigating that possibility," she said.
"That's not an answer."
"No," she said.
"It isn't." She folded her hands.
"Claire, I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer carefully.
In the fourteen months since you first contacted us, did anyone — anyone at all — approach you and suggest that you drop the divorce, reconcile with Harrison, or leave Washington?"
I set the photograph down.
"Patricia came to my office," I said.
"Four months ago.
She said she wanted to have lunch.
We went to a restaurant near the Hill.
She spent forty minutes telling me that Harrison still loved me, that the marriage had been difficult because of his deployments, that I owed it to the family to try again."
"Did she say anything else?"
"At the end, when I told her I wasn't going to reconsider, she put her hand over mine on the table." I paused.
"She said, 'Claire, there are people in this city who know things about you that you wouldn't want made public.
I would hate for any of that to become complicated.' Then she paid the bill and left."
Marsh wrote something in her notebook.
"You didn't report that conversation to us," she said.
"No."
"Why not?"
I looked at the window.
The Capitol lights were gone now, washed out by the early grey of morning.
"Because I didn't know if I could trust you," I said.
"I still don't know who in your office told her I was coming."
Marsh closed her notebook.
"That's fair," she said.
"And I won't insult you by promising it won't happen again.
What I can tell you is that the person we believe passed that information has been suspended pending investigation, and everything from this point forward is being handled by a team of four people.
You've met two of them tonight."
"What happens now?" I asked.
"Harrison goes in for interview this morning.
His attorney will advise him to say nothing, and he will say nothing, and we will spend the next seventy-two hours building the formal case for tribunal referral." She stood.
"Patricia is a separate matter.
Her situation is more complicated."
"More complicated how?"
Marsh picked up the folder from the coffee table and tucked it under her arm.
"Because Patricia Vance didn't only use your network to hide money," she said.
"She used it to pass information.
Defense contractor schedules.
Procurement timelines.
One communication in particular — sent in October 2021 — contained the movement schedule for a logistics convoy in the Gulf."
The room tilted slightly.
"Was anyone h*rt?" I asked.
Marsh looked at me steadily.
"The convoy was rerouted forty-eight hours before departure," she said.
"Someone flagged an anomaly in the routing data.
We believe that anomaly was flagged by your own system's security protocol — a protocol you built."
I sat with that for a moment.
"My firewall caught it," I said.
"Your firewall caught it," she confirmed.
"Which is part of why we came to you fourteen months ago, and part of why we needed the divorce to proceed before we could move.
The moment you were no longer legally connected to Harrison Vance, the access logs became evidence instead of marital property."
She moved toward the ruined doorway and stopped.
"Get some sleep," she said.
"We'll need a formal statement from you at 14:00."
She left.
I sat alone in the quiet apartment with the broken door and the photograph on the coffee table and the slow understanding that my firewall had, at some point, done more than protect data.
It had protected lives.
And Patricia had known that when she sat across from me at lunch and put her hand over mine and smiled.
My phone lit up on the desk.
Unknown number.
Encrypted routing signature I didn't recognize.
May you like
The message was four words.
*She told him everything.*
