They found Leo ninety minutes later in the service corridor of an abandoned clinic, shivering inside a linen cart. He was eight years old, barefoot, and clutching a cracked phone with a cartoon shark sticker. His mother, Anya, had been taken away in an ambulance before Mara arrived. Alive, barely.
Leo did not cry until Mara wrapped her blazer around his shoulders.
“I didn’t make it up,” he said. “I saw him. The bird watch.”
“I believe you,” Mara replied.
Adrian stood at the doorway speaking to police, his voice low and controlled. The detective in charge, Senior Sergeant Halden, looked uncomfortable—too uncomfortable. When Mara saw him pocket a small evidence bag instead of logging it, she took one silent photo.
Back at Lorne & Bell, Leo refused to enter any room with windows. So Mara hid him in the copy room behind boxes of archived case files while Adrian deployed the firm like a private emergency network.
“Security footage?” Mara asked.
“Clinic cameras were erased.”
“Of course.”
“But the bakery across the street had a delivery cam. We got a partial plate.”
Mara looked up from her screen. “That’s illegal.”
Adrian’s mouth curved. “It was freely offered by an elderly baker who finds me charming.”
“No one finds you charming.”
“You did, briefly, in the elevator.”
“I was under oxygen deprivation.”
Something moved between them—sharp, inconvenient, alive. Mara buried it under work.
At noon, the national news broke a headline: NEW WITNESS CLAIMS ROOK DEATH WAS MURDER. No names, but enough detail to be dangerous. Someone inside the police had leaked.
Leo crawled from behind the copy boxes, pale. “They’ll find me.”
Mara knelt in front of him. “Not if I can help it.”
The words came out too fiercely. Too personally.
Adrian noticed. “Mara.”
She ignored him.
Years ago, Mara had failed to protect someone smaller than herself: her little sister June, caught in the blast radius of their mother’s neglect and the courts’ indifference. June survived, but Mara had carried the guilt like a second spine ever since. It was why she trusted documents more than people, evidence more than promises, exits more than embraces.
Leo reached into his hoodie and pulled out a plastic bracelet. Hospital visitor blue. On the inside, written in tiny letters, was a file number.
“Mum said this would prove Dr. Rook didn’t jump,” Leo said. “She said the angel lady would know what it meant.”
Mara frowned. “Angel lady?”
Adrian went still.
“What?” she asked.
His answer was quiet. “My mother volunteers at that hospital chapel. Patients call her the angel lady.”
Mara stared at him. “Your mother had evidence?”
“No,” Adrian said, but the certainty was missing.
At that moment, his phone rang. He listened, and the blood drained from his face.
“My mother’s apartment has been broken into.”
