My brother’s car was already there.

That made my shoulders tighten before I even turned off the engine.

He was twenty-nine, worked remotely doing freelance graphic design, and had the gift of making every situation sound like it was happening to him personally. We were siblings in the legal and biological sense, but not in the warm movie sense. We showed up at Christmas. We sent each other birthday texts. We didn’t call just to talk.

He opened the front door before I reached it.

“You made it,” he said, holding a paper cup of coffee like a prop.

“Where’s Mom?”

“Upstairs. She’s packing a bag for the hospital.” He looked past me toward my car. “You bring work with you?”

There was something too casual in the question.

I shifted the hard case behind my leg. “I brought what I needed.”

He smirked. “Mysterious.”

I stepped around him into the house. It smelled like lemon cleaner, microwaved soup, and my mother’s lavender hand soap. Everything felt too normal. A basket of folded towels sat on the stairs. My father’s reading glasses lay open on the side table. His slippers were still parked under his recliner, toes pointed toward the television like he had only gotten up for a minute.

My mother came downstairs with red eyes and a canvas overnight bag in her hand. When she saw me, she folded into my arms.

For a moment, I stopped being an investigator. I was just her daughter in the hallway of the house where I grew up, holding a woman who suddenly sounded smaller than she used to.

“He knew me,” she whispered. “At the hospital. He knew my name.”

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s very good.”

But over her shoulder, I saw my brother looking at the black hard case in my hand.

His eyes stayed on the lock.

And for reasons I couldn’t explain yet, the tiny metal click it made when I set it down in the guest room sounded much louder than it should have.

### Part 2

My old bedroom had stopped being mine years ago.

My mother called it the guest room now, which meant she had erased most of the evidence that I had ever lived there and replaced it with things no guest had asked for. Beige curtains. A framed watercolor of a lighthouse. A glass bowl full of decorative shells, even though we lived nowhere near an ocean. The desk by the window was the same one I had used in high school, but she had painted it white and put a little ceramic lamp on it with a shade that gave off soft, useless light.

I set the hard case on the floor beside the desk, not on the bed, not on the dresser, not anywhere casual. I unlocked it, removed the laptop, checked the seals, powered it on, connected through the secure VPN, and sent the required check-in message.

Arrived at family residence. Device secured. Available for critical contact only.

Then I shut it down, placed it back in the case, locked the case, and slid the key onto the ring I kept clipped inside my jacket.