Chapter 4 - THE WOMAN WHO WARNED HIM
If Emily had wanted Jack out of her life completely, she could have let the key card vanish without a trace.
That left him with two possibilities.
Either she had dropped it on purpose.
Or someone wanted him to think she had.
Neither possibility let him sleep.
The next morning he took the card to a woman named Monica Ruiz, a paralegal from the legal clinic who had referred him to a fraud attorney.
Monica was nobody’s fool. Forty-three, sharp-eyed, raised three sons in East Baltimore, and had the patient voice of someone who could cut through panic without dismissing it.
She looked at the card.
“Do you still love her?”
Jack stared.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything,” Monica said. “Men who still love the person who hurt them are easier to manipulate.”
Jack sat back in the chair.
“Then assume I’m easy.”
“Are you?”
He looked at the card again.
“I don’t know anymore.”
Monica helped him file a formal dispute over the loan signatures and advised him not to contact Ryan again without counsel.
Then she glanced at the note on the card and frowned.
“Holloway Health Foundation has been in local news for years. Donations, hospital expansions, all that pretty public stuff.”
“And?”
“And pretty public stuff often sits on top of ugly private stuff.”
That afternoon Jack did something he hadn’t done in nearly a year.
He called his older cousin Elena Mercer.
Elena was an investigative reporter for the Baltimore Ledger.
Jack and Elena had grown up together until life pulled them into different classes, different neighborhoods, different versions of adulthood.
She answered on the third ring.
“Well, construction prince. You only call when something is on fire.”
“It might be.”
He told her everything.
Not every detail of seven years with Emily.
Just the important parts:
graduation,
ring,
loans,
Ryan Holloway,
the key card,
Look at Holloway.
Elena was quiet longer than he expected.
Then she asked one question.
“Did Emily ever mention a resident named Dr. Priya Nair?”
Jack searched his memory.
“No.”
“She died six months ago.”
“Okay…”
“She fell from an access stairwell in the Saint Catherine’s Research Pavilion after midnight. Officially, it was ruled an accident.”
Jack’s spine stiffened.
“Why does that matter?”
Elena exhaled.
“Because I got an anonymous tip two months ago claiming Nair had discovered irregularities in a privately funded device trial tied to the Holloway Foundation.”
Jack didn’t speak.
Elena continued.
“I couldn’t prove enough to run it. The source vanished after one email.”
Jack looked down at the key card in his hand.
A key card from the research pavilion.
Dropped by Emily.
Written with three words.
Look at Holloway.
May you like
“Do you think that source was Emily?” he asked.
“I think,” Elena said, “that if your ex-fiancée publicly humiliated you and then quietly handed you access to a building connected to a dead doctor, you’re not dealing with a simple love triangle.”
