Eight months passed.

I tracked Victor's company from a distance. Not obsessively — the way you tracked a project you were going to have to understand completely before you could work on it.

Crane Group was a real estate development company with seventeen active projects across four states. Victor had built it from a regional firm into something significant over ten years, and the thing he'd built was genuinely good. The projects were well-designed, well-managed, and he had a talent for seeing where a neighborhood was going before the neighborhood knew.

I had respected that about him once.

The financial problem that had driven him to Harlan was this: two years before the fire, Crane Group had over-leveraged on a commercial project in a market that had moved the wrong way. The shortfall was not catastrophic — not business-ending — but it had required a bridge. Harlan had provided the bridge through a set of insurance arrangements that had, over time, become the kind of entanglement that gave Harlan leverage over Victor rather than the other way around.

I understood this because I had spent eight months becoming the kind of person who understood it.

I had also spent eight months understanding Harlan.

Harlan Sloane was sixty-three, a former insurance adjuster who had built a side business in what you might politely call risk management and what a district attorney would call fraud. He had done this to at least four other people before Victor and I was reasonably certain of two of them. The other two were harder to document.

The documentation was the work.

I had always been better at the patient, detailed work than I looked.

My mother had said once: the advantage of being underestimated is that people leave you to do the work in peace.

I was working in peace.

On a Tuesday in month eight, I received a notification that Crane Group had posted a job listing for an independent consultant to advise on a major new development project. The project was in the city I'd left. The qualifications required were exactly what Elena Marsh had been building for eight months.

I applied.

Not impulsively — I had been waiting for this specific kind of opening, the one that would put me inside the information flow of Crane Group without being inside Victor's direct line of sight. A consultant was adjacent enough to be useful and distant enough to move without being watched.

The interview was by video call.

I spoke to Victor's head of development, a woman named Sara who had been with Crane Group for six years and who was, from everything I could tell, good at her job and completely unaware of the arrangements between Victor and Harlan.

She offered me the position at the end of the call.

I accepted.

"We'd need you on-site starting next Monday," she said.

"Monday works," I said.

I put the phone down.

I looked at the window of the motel room I'd been living in for eight months.

Monday.

I was going back.

Not as Adeline Crane, who was dead and buried and whose husband had already been paid two million dollars for the inconvenience of her dying.

As Elena Marsh.

I was going back to watch.

To understand.

To finish what Victor had started — not with fire, but with the truth, which was slower and more certain and hurt in exactly the right places.

I started packing.

In month five I found the second victim.

His name was Robert Aldiss, and he had been an Apex Insurance client of Harlan's in the same period that Victor had been, and his wife had died in a gas leak that was ruled accidental, and eighteen months later Robert Aldiss himself had died by suicide, and the insurance payout from his wife's policy had passed through three accounts before landing in a holding company that shared a registered address with one of Harlan's shell entities.

I found this through the specific slow work of following financial documentation through public records. It was not glamorous. It was the kind of work that required eight-hour sessions at a laptop and the ability to hold a complex web of names and dates and account numbers in your head long enough to see the pattern emerge.

I was good at patterns.

Robert Aldiss had a daughter named Clara who was twenty-seven and living in Portland, and who had, when I'd been able to establish enough of a connection to reach her anonymously, confirmed in an email that her father had always believed there was something wrong with the ruling on her mother's death, and that he had been in contact with someone at the insurance commission before his death, and that she had kept everything he'd gathered.

I gave Clara Aldiss Patrick Osei's contact information.

Then I waited.

Three weeks later Patrick Osei had what he'd been missing from the Aldiss file.

He didn't know yet who had pointed him there.

He didn't know about me at all.

That was correct.

Patrick Osei was the mechanism that would run after I'd done my part. He was a good mechanism — thorough, patient, the kind of investigator who understood that a case built correctly was a case that stuck.

His case against Harlan was now more complete than it had been.

Mine was not yet complete.

The Crane Group consulting position was the final piece.

I applied on a Tuesday.

I was hired on a Thursday.

On Sunday night I sat in the motel room and looked at the contract Elena Marsh had signed and thought about what walking back into that building was going to cost.

Not in terms of risk — the risk was calculable and I had calculated it.

In terms of what it meant to stand in the rooms where a version of my life had been and to hold that steady while doing the work.

That was the cost.

I decided it was one I could pay.

I had paid harder things already.

Monday.

I drove back.