Chapter 27 — Seven O'Clock and the Little Lies

They moved like people rehearsing a robbery that felt less illegal and more like triage. The office smelled of coffee gone thin and the tiny citrus of Anders’ hand sanitizer. Harrow read over the packet one last time—the forensics memo, the photographs from Unit 94, Elena’s signed statement folded into a neat, tragic square. Anders had scrubbed the logs until they sang; every cut, every handoff, every MAC address was annotated like a ...