Chapter Six · The Little Bird Was Family

I couldn't let it go.

For two days, Jax's words sat in my chest like a splinter. Wait till Dad tells them who you really are. It was nonsense. It had to be nonsense. Jax didn't have a secret. Jax couldn't keep a secret if it was taped to his rental agreement. But the way he'd said it — the almost-relief in it, the promise of a held card — had been too clean to be pure bluster.

So I did the thing I never did. I asked for help.

I texted Silas: Can I ask you a professional favor? Off the record. About the Reyes contract.

His reply came back in four minutes: Name it.

Who actually leaked the Reyes hold-up to Mara Quinn? Kael said it was her "little birds." I want to know which bird. Quietly. I don't want anyone to know I asked.

His reply this time took two days.

Two days of me sleeping badly, two days of me pretending at the Pacific Heights site that I was fine, two days of Kael glancing at me over blueprints with that quiet patience of his that made me want to confess everything and nothing at once.

Then, at nine p.m. on a Tuesday, an email landed in my inbox. Subject line: nothing. Body: one line, followed by an attachment.

Not Mara's bird. The trail leads where you don't want it to. Read the attachment. — S.

I opened the attachment. It was a chat export.

I read it sitting on my kitchen floor, because my legs had stopped working.

The conversation was between my father, Richard Cole, and a number listed only as "D. Halcyon — Procurement." Halcyon Interiors. My direct competitor. The firm that had been bidding against me on every mid-size hotel account in the city for two years.

The messages went back a year.

RICHARD: Maren's Reyes timeline: final walkthrough the 14th. They want the south lounge redone. She's quoting 410 all in.

D. HALCYON: Nice. Our guy will undercut by 12. Consulting fee incoming.

RICHARD: Appreciated. She's got a condo project next month too, in Arlington. I'll send the numbers when she shares them.

The next message was a bank-transfer screenshot. Twelve thousand dollars, spread across four "consulting fees."

I read it twice. Then a third time, slowly, the way you read a death certificate.

My own father. My own father had been selling my project timelines, my pricing, my client list — one tweet at a time, one twelve-thousand-dollar wire at a time — to the competitor who'd been trying to bury my studio since I'd opened it. He'd taken my Reyes walkthrough notes, the notes I'd printed out at Kinko's and brought home to "show the family," and he'd FedExed them to a man who bid against me on the same account. He'd sat across from me at Thanksgiving and asked me how business was, and then gone home and sold my margins to the people who were pricing me out of the market.

Somewhere far away, I heard my own breathing. It sounded like a stranger's.

I'd rather be alone than drained again, I thought, and the sentence landed in me like a verdict I'd already sentenced myself to. I had been drained by their hands, by their mouths, by their prayers posted online. I had never once suspected the drain came with a wire transfer attached. I had thought, foolishly, that the worst they would ever do to me was emotional. That they were too lazy, too unmotivated, too wrapped up in Jax's next scheme to actually build a criminal enterprise out of my career.

I had underestimated how small they were. Small enough to do anything for twelve thousand dollars.

I scrolled to the last message. Dated three days ago.

D. HALCYON: Next thing — the Ashford project. Get me her early concepts. The north lounge especially. We'll pay double.

RICHARD: Working on it. She's been weird lately. Closer. I'll get what I can.

I closed my eyes.

My phone rang. Zoe. I answered on autopilot.

"Hey," she said. "You sound like someone just died."

"It's worse than that." My voice was flat, distant. "My father has been selling my business to Halcyon for a year. Twelve thousand dollars. That's what my trade secrets are worth to him. Twelve thousand."

Zoe went quiet. Then, in the voice of a woman who has been waiting her whole life for permission to say it: "Maren. Baby. You have to burn them down. You have to burn them all the way down."

"Not yet." I said it before I'd even decided. "Not yet. I'm not confronting him tonight. I'm not confronting him tomorrow. I'm — Zoe, I'm filing this. I'm keeping it. And I'm going to keep everything he gives me, until I have enough."

"Enough for what?"

"Enough that when I walk away," I said, "they can't follow."

I saved the file to an encrypted folder I had just created on my cloud drive. I named it, with a calm that frightened me, "receipts." I made a second folder, just in case, and backed the file up to a drive I kept in a drawer that Jax didn't know existed. I had learned, over twenty-four years, that you never keep all your eggs in a basket your family can reach.

Outside my window, the city glittered. I sat on my kitchen floor and did not cry. I had a new policy now. I cried only in rooms I had built for other people to breathe in. My kitchen was not one of them.