Simon Reyes had been thirty-one years old when Lydia Hart's world ended, a second-year graduate student in her lab with his own name on two of the fourteen years of data that later got called fraudulent by people who had never once looked at the raw files. He was thirty-five now, and he still remembered, with a clarity that hadn't faded the way he'd hoped it eventually might, the specific cowardice of the week the story broke, when the department chair had gathered the lab in a conference room and asked, gently, whether any of them wanted to distance their names from the research before the university's own review concluded.
He had stayed quiet. Everyone had. He told himself, for the first year afterward, that quiet wasn't the same as betrayal, that a scared second-year with a mortgage-sized student loan balance and a visa status tied to his enrollment hadn't really had a choice. He'd mostly believed that, until Elise died, and the belief had curdled into something he'd never quite found language for, something that lived in his chest now like a low, permanent hum.
So when Lydia had found him again, three years later, working a research technician job that used perhaps a third of what he actually knew how to do, and asked for his help with something she wouldn't fully explain, he had said yes before she'd finished the sentence. He hadn't asked enough questions in the beginning. He understood that now, standing in the doorway of her underground office at eleven that night, still smelling faintly of pine and lake water from a drive he was already regretting.
"You said confirm the location," he said, before she could speak. "You didn't say stand in a stranger's backyard until a camera lit up like a searchlight."
Lydia looked up from her desk, the old leather chair creaking as she turned toward him, and something in her expression—tired, focused, unreadable in the low light—didn't quite meet the heat in his voice. "Did anyone see your face?"
"That's not the question I asked."
"It's the relevant one." She set down her pen. "Did anyone see your face, Simon."
"No. I don't think so. I left the second the light came on, I wasn't stupid about it." He crossed the room and sat, uninvited, in the chair across from her desk, the same chair Jake Miller would never sit in, would never even know existed. "There's a little girl in that house, Lydia. Six years old, based on what I could see through the window before the camera spooked me. I stood at the edge of her yard at two in the morning because you asked me to confirm a location you already knew. That wasn't confirmation. That was something else, and I want you to say out loud what it actually was, because I don't think either of us fully believes the version where it was nothing."
Lydia was quiet for a long moment, and Simon watched her do the thing he'd seen her do a hundred times in the old lab, back when a null result threatened a hypothesis she badly wanted to be true—turning the discomfort over slowly, refusing to look away from it even when looking away would have been so much easier.
"I wanted to know how exposed they were," she said finally. "The physical location, the sightlines, whether the property had cameras already or whether it was truly as unprotected as I'd assumed. That's the honest answer. I'm not going to dress it up as more innocent than it was, and I'm not going to pretend the answer required someone to stand there for ninety seconds instead of thirty."
"So it was a mistake."
"It was carelessness. I've been careless twice this week, which is twice more than I intend to be for the rest of however long this takes." She rubbed at her eyes, and for a moment, in the low light, she looked less like the woman who had built a shell company three layers deep and more like exactly what she was—a fifty-six-year-old woman who hadn't slept properly in four years, running on grief and caffeine and a discipline that was fraying faster than she wanted to admit even to herself. "I am not interested in frightening a child, Simon. I want to be extremely clear with you about that, because I need you to still be useful to me, and you're not going to be useful to me if you think I've become someone who terrorizes six-year-olds for sport."
"Then what am I doing here? What's the actual plan, because from where I'm sitting, it looks like you're improvising in the dark and hoping the improvisation adds up to something coherent by the end."
Something flickered across her face, quick and unguarded, gone before he could fully name it. "The plan was always about him. Jake Miller. I wanted him to understand, completely, unforgettably, what it costs to have something taken without warning and without the chance to prepare for it. I have accomplished that. He knows my name. He knows my daughter's name. He has sat, however briefly, with the actual weight of what he did, in a way I don't believe he ever would have on his own, left to his ordinary comfortable life." She paused. "I did not build a plan that accounted for a friend as resourceful as the one he has. I did not account for a wife who would believe him. I did not account for needing to know, urgently and immediately, how safe his family actually was, once it became clear how much ground they were gaining. The plan is adjusting. That's not the same as it having become something monstrous. I need you to trust that distinction, because I don't think I can do the next part of this without you, and I don't think you came back into my life three years ago to walk away the first time it got uncomfortable."
Simon sat with that, the low hum in his chest neither quieting nor sharpening, caught in the same uneasy suspension it had occupied for three years now, ever since he'd first said yes to a woman he owed a debt he wasn't sure was payable through anything he was actually doing.
"I won't go near the daughter again," he said finally. "Not confirmation, not surveillance, not anything. If that's what the next part of this requires, you'll have to find someone else, or do it yourself."
"That's fair," Lydia said, and something in her voice, quiet and immediate, suggested she'd expected exactly this line and had already decided, before he'd walked in tonight, where she was willing to draw it herself. "I wasn't going to ask you to. I want to be honest with you about something else, too, since we're being honest tonight." She reached for the folder still sitting open on her desk, the one marked PHASE TWO, and turned it so he could see the name typed at the top. "This part isn't about the daughter, and it's not really about the wife either, not directly. It's about the friend. Jordan Parker. He's the one taking apart everything I built, faster than I planned for, and I need to slow him down before he finishes the job."
Simon looked at the name for a long moment, something cold moving through him that had nothing to do with the late hour or the cold office air. "Slow him down how."
"Not the way you're imagining. I already cost him his job. That was supposed to be enough friction to buy me time. It wasn't." She closed the folder. "I'm still deciding what comes next. I wanted you to know that much, at minimum, before you decide how much further you're willing to walk this road with me. I'm not going to lie to you about what I'm considering, even the parts I haven't fully decided on yet. You've earned that much honesty, whatever else I haven't earned from you in return."
Simon stood, the chair scraping against the concrete floor, and looked down at a woman he had once respected more than almost anyone alive, and still did, somewhere underneath everything, even now, even here.
"Don't make me the reason I regret coming back," he said quietly, and let himself out, up the stairs, into a night that had gone, somewhere in the last hour, unmistakably colder.
Lydia sat alone for a long while after the door closed behind him, the folder still open on the desk, Jordan Parker's name typed in flat, undramatic letters that gave no indication at all of how much weight she'd already decided to hang on them, and thought, not for the first time this week, about how easily a plan built around a single act of reckoning could metastasize, quietly and almost without her noticing, into something with far more names attached to it than the one she'd started with.
She picked up her pen anyway, and began, in her small, careful handwriting, to plan.