His phone rang.
Rosa.
He let it go to voicemail. Two minutes later, she called again. Then again. Finally, he answered.
“What, Rosa?”
“You can’t do this.”
Her voice was shaking.
“My parents are good people. Whatever you think you know—”
“I know they destroyed my family. I know they left our daughter in the rain for four hours. I know they’ve been systematically defrauding people for over a decade.”
He kept his voice level.
“Where are you?”
“Still at my parents’. Brendan, please, can we talk about this? Work something out?”
“Did you know?”
The question came out harder than he intended.
“About my parents. About what your father did to them.”
Silence.
“Rosa. Did you know?”
“I… they said it was business. That your father made bad choices.”
“Didn’t know, or didn’t want to know?”
Brendan closed his eyes.
“Come home, Rosa. Tonight you can sleep in the guest room. But tomorrow you decide. Them or us. There’s no middle ground anymore.”
He hung up before she could respond.
Lucy watched him carefully.
“Is Mom going to choose us?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. I hope so. But we have to be prepared if she doesn’t.”
Lucy pulled a notebook from her backpack, the same notebook she used for school projects.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Since I found the safe. We need to hit them in ways they can’t recover from.”
Brendan looked at his twelve-year-old daughter, this small, fierce person who had inherited not just his eyes, but his capacity for strategy.
“What did you have in mind?”
Lucy flipped the notebook open. Inside were pages of neat handwriting, diagrams, names, connections. She had been planning this for months.
“First, we need to understand who’s most vulnerable in their network. The people they can’t afford to lose.”
She pointed to a name.
“Steven Douglas, the appraiser. He has a gambling problem. There are bank records showing huge losses at casinos. If anyone investigates, they’ll find he’s appraising properties fraudulently to cover his debts.”
She turned a page.
“Second, Rosa Davis, the real estate agent. She’s actually licensed, which means she has professional ethics requirements. If the state board finds out she’s steering vulnerable clients into predatory schemes, she loses her license.”
Another page.
“Third, Willard Pierce, the lawyer. He’s the most careful, but he’s also the most exposed. Lawyers have strict ethical rules. One complaint to the bar association with solid evidence and he’s done.”
Brendan stared at the notebook.
“How long have you been working on this?”
“Six months. Since I found the safe and started photographing documents when they weren’t looking.”
Lucy looked up at him.
“I was going to wait until I was older. Until I could do something about it myself. But then today happened, and I realized…”
She swallowed hard.
“I realized they’ll never stop. They’ll hurt me to hurt you. So we have to stop them first.”
Brendan felt pride and fear rise together inside him. Pride at her intelligence and courage. Fear of what the world might do to someone so young who already understood its darkness.
“Okay,” he said. “We do this together. But we do it right. No rushing. No mistakes. We take our time and dismantle them piece by piece.”
Lucy smiled then, a real smile, fierce and bright.
“When do we start?”
“Tomorrow morning. After I make some calls.”
He looked at the clock.
“Almost eleven. For now, you need sleep. It’s been a long day.”
She hugged him tightly.
“Thanks for coming home, Dad.”
