“Good.We need someone inside that hospital who knows what they’re looking at.But Graham?—”
“I’m already thinking about it.”
“She needs protection.Real protection.Not check-ins and burner phones.”
“I heard you.”
“I’ll handle it,” Graham said.
“Okay.”Another pause.“Just make sure you know what ’it’ is.”
Graham hung up.
He stood in front of the bakery with the phone in his hand and the November air cool against his face.He thought about the way Maren had looked at him when she asked about the girl.Not pleading.Not fragile.Honest.A person who needed to know the worst so she could figure out how to fight it.
He thought about another girl.Years ago.A different country, a different building, the same arithmetic—who you could reach and who you couldn’t.The math never came out clean.
Three weeks ago, he’d told Maren Ward that one signature wasn’t enough.She’d said,So I need the pattern.She’d gone silent for three weeks.And then she’d walked into a bakery with a notebook full of evidence and handed it to him without flinching.
The pattern was there.The question was whether he could dismantle what it pointed to before the people running it dismantled her.
Graham put his phone in his pocket and walked to his truck.
Chapter 3
The Blossom Springs Library closed at five on Tuesdays.
Maren got there at four, carrying the notebook in her bag like it was something that could detonate.She’d slept three hours after the meeting with Graham—fitful, interrupted sleep that left her more tired than the twelve-hour shift had.Every time she’d closed her eyes, she’d seen the empty bed in bay four.Fresh sheets.Monitors dark.
The library was small.One main room with tall windows that let in the fading afternoon light, a children’s section in the back with a reading rug shaped like a caterpillar, and six public-access computers along the west wall.Two of the computers were occupied—a teenager with headphones and an older man pecking at a keyboard with his index fingers.
Maren chose the computer farthest from both of them.She sat with her back to the wall, opened the notebook flat on the desk beside the keyboard, and pulled out the burner phone Graham had given her.
Fifty-three pages.She photographed each one, holding the phone steady, making sure the handwriting was legible in every frame.It took twenty-two minutes.Her hands stayed steady throughout, the way they always did when the task in front of her was specific and concrete.It was the in-between moments that got her—the waiting, the not-knowing.Give her a thing to do, and she could do it.Take the task away, and the fear crept in.
She reviewed the photos.Checked the resolution on a few of the margin notes.Reshot two pages where the binding shadow had obscured a date.
Then she connected to the library’s public Wi-Fi and sent the entire batch to the number Graham had programmed into the burner.
The response came ninety seconds later.
I could see the scope at the bakery.The detail is even stronger page by page.Don’t carry the original anymore.Find somewhere safe that isn’t your car or your house.
She stared at the message.Somewhere safe that wasn’t her car or her house.Because those were the first two places someone would look.
Maren closed the notebook, put it in her bag, and sat for a moment watching the last of the daylight move across the library floor.The teenager with headphones was bobbing his head to something she couldn’t hear.The older man had given up on the keyboard and was reading the newspaper instead, holding it close to his face.
Normal.Everything in this room was normal.The abnormality was her—the woman with a bag full of evidence and a burner phone and the knowledge, confirmed that afternoon by a man she’d decided to trust, that the hospital she’d given eighteen months of her life to was a waypoint in a trafficking network that stretched beyond Blossom Springs.She knew now.Knowing didn’t make it easier.It made every ordinary thing in this room feel like a lie.
She stood, tucked the notebook deep in her bag, and left the library through the front entrance.She’d figure out where to hide it later.Right now, she had a shift to get to.
* * *
Blossom Springs General looked different when you knew.
Maren had driven down Hospital Road hundreds of times, had badged through the side entrance and changed into scrubs in the locker room without thinking.Tonight, everything had edges.The security camera above the side entrance that she’d never paid attention to.The click of her badge through the reader—a log entry, a timestamp, proof that Maren Ward was in the building.
Peg Landry was already at the nurses’ station when Maren arrived, pulling on a cardigan over her scrubs.