If you are reading this, it likely means I could not come back to you the way I promised.
The rest blurred for a moment because I was already crying.
Sterling wrote about the Alpharetta project—how it had become valuable enough to attract dangerous attention, how Victor wanted control of it, how Ellis had agreed to terms that amounted to betrayal. He wrote that he had started gathering evidence on Victor’s broader activities: money laundering, intimidation, land grabs, tax crimes, more than I fully understood. He wrote that Ellis tried to bribe him into leaving the country quietly.
He refused.
Then near the end came the line that changed the room all over again.
If something happens to me, trust no one in my family. Not even Jordan.
Jordan went white.
I looked up slowly.
She stared at the screen as though she had been struck.
“No,” she said. “No. He can’t have meant that.”
Elias didn’t speak.
The silence that followed was different from every earlier silence. This one had edges. Questions. The sudden raw ache of uncertainty after we had only just become allies.
Jordan looked at me with tears already gathering.
“Amara, I swear to you, I don’t know why he wrote that.”
I believed her shock. I did. But Sterling had written those words when he thought death—or something close to it—was near. That could not be waved away.
Elias was the one who steadied the moment.
“People under that kind of pressure misread things,” he said carefully. “Or they react to incomplete information. There has to be a reason.”
I swallowed and forced myself to think instead of panic.
“Jordan,” I said, “was there anything between you and Sterling before he disappeared? Any argument? Any misunderstanding? Anything you told your parents without meaning harm?”
She shook her head, crying harder now. “No. We were fine. He even gave me money and told me to get away for a while because he thought something bad was coming.”
Then she stopped mid-sentence and stared at the table.
“My phone.”
“What about it?” Elias asked.
“I lost it. About two weeks before he disappeared. I was out with friends. I had too much to drink. The next morning it was gone. I replaced the SIM and thought that was it.”
Elias and I exchanged a look.
“It wasn’t lost,” he said. “It was taken.”
Jordan closed her eyes.
I understood before she did.
If Sterling had been texting or speaking openly with her, and Celeste or Ellis got hold of her phone, then they could have read everything. They would know she was the person he trusted. And Sterling, realizing information had leaked through her somehow, might have believed she had betrayed him herself.
The warning in the letter was not hatred.
It was hurt.
Jordan bent forward and covered her face, sobbing in a way that made her seem suddenly much younger than the polished woman in the Cadillac.
I moved to sit beside her and laid a hand on her shoulder.
“This isn’t on you,” I said softly. “You were played too.”
She shook her head, still crying. “He died thinking I betrayed him.”
I could not promise her that wasn’t true, because we still didn’t know if he was dead at all. The word caught in my throat before I could say it.
Dead.
Missing.
Gone.
Victor had threatened Ellis to “handle” him. That could mean more than one thing.
Elias voiced it first. “There’s something important here. Victor didn’t say kill. He said handle.”
Jordan lifted her head.
“And?”
“And a man like Victor might decide a living witness under control is more useful than a dead one—at least for a time.”
Hope is cruel because it returns before you are ready for it. Mine came back suddenly and so sharply I almost hated it.
“You think Sterling could still be alive?”
Elias did not answer immediately. “I think we can’t rule it out.”
