I taste metal on my tongue by the time he texts: parking.
Riley’s office is quieter than it has any right to be. The ramen smell has faded into cold noodles and cardboard, and the only sound is the heater’s uneven wheeze. Harbor Glen’s lights smear in the window behind Riley’s desk, the peninsula curled around the black water like a hook, the hospital and foundation wing up on the hill glowing steady and sterile.
My phone buzzes again.
Call me on Signal. No video.
I tap the app and hit the encrypted call icon. It rings once.
“Hey,” I whisper when it connects.
“Say something normal,” Daniel says. His voice is low, tinny in my ear.
“Uh.” I look around the office, brain blank. “We’re out of coffee.”
Somewhere on his end, there’s a thunk like a car door closing, then the muffled whir of winter air.
“Okay,” he murmurs. “Now if anyone pulls the audio, we’re fighting about caffeine.”
I press the phone tighter to my ear, knuckles white.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“Side lot,” he says. “Staff parking. Security cameras are focused on the front because donors like to see themselves walk in. Back here it’s just Mercer crest decals on frosted glass and one bored guard watching local news.”
I picture the building: low, modern lines, all glass and brushed metal, the crest repeating on doors and donation plaques, the whole place selling benevolent empire. Harbor Glen’s peninsula narrows where the foundation sits, cliffside mansions looming above even that, literally higher than the laws that bend around them.
“Talk me through it,” I say. “I want to know where you are.”
“Front card reader first,” he answers. “I have to sign in like a good boy.”
Footsteps crunch across gravel. Then a faint electronic chirp, the hush of an automatic door breathing open. The change in sound hits my ear: echoing tile instead of open air, fluorescent hum under his voice.
“Smells like disinfectant and money,” he mutters. “They pipe the hospital scent in for ‘brand continuity.’”
I let the image root: polished floors, tastefully framed photos from the Light the Harbor parade—Mercer yachts blazing with white lights, smaller boats crowded with people craning to see whose name is on the biggest deck. A donor wall somewhere, names ranked like a social periodic table, the crest in the center.
“You’re okay,” I say. “You’ve done a million late nights in that office.”
“Not with my heartbeat in my teeth,” he says.
The badge beeps again, a closer, sharper tone. I hear the soft shhh of another door. His footsteps change from echo to carpeted hush.
“Passing the donor wall,” he narrates. “Hi, Mrs. Light The Harbor, hi, Mr. Endowed Wing, please don’t crucify me when this is over.”
My stomach flips.
“Server room first?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “My office. I need my laptop to pull anything off the secure network. IT locked external drives out of the main box last year.”
He goes quiet for a few seconds. A door latch clicks, hinges murmur.
“I’m in,” he says. “Lights on low. My plant is dead, by the way.”
“You never watered it,” I say automatically.
He huffs out air that might be a laugh. Keyboard keys clack, trackpad taps. I walk to Riley’s map and rest my free hand on the cork, feeling the paper edges beneath my fingertips.
“Okay,” he mutters. “VPN is up. Internal dashboard loading… come on…”
The heater rattles in the corner. Outside, somewhere down the hill, a siren wails and then fades into the harbor wind.
“Dashboard’s up,” he says. “Going into Disbursements.”
“You rehearsed this,” I remind him. “Shortest path to the files, no sightseeing.”
“Right.” Another series of clicks. “Finance > Restricted Funds > Discretionary Grants. I’m in.”
I straighten, hope flaring sharp.
“Do you see them?” I ask. “The ‘continuity stabilization’ grants you mentioned?”
“I see… hang on.” His voice trails. “Wait. That’s not right.”
My muscles go tight.
“Daniel?” I say. “What’s not right?”
“The list,” he says slowly. “There should be hundreds of entries here. Years of them. It’s empty. Just the last quarter’s regular grants. No ‘special’ anything.”
The air in Riley’s office thickens. I press my nails into the corkboard.
“Maybe it’s filtered wrong?” I say. “Someone changed a default?”
“I’m not that rusty,” he says. Keys tap faster, more agitated. “I’m checking the archive.”
He murmurs to himself while he works. I catch fragments: “date range,” “server path,” “mirror 03.” Then a silence that buzzes.
“No way,” he whispers.
“What?” My voice comes out too loud in the quiet room.
“The archive directories are gone,” he says. “Whole folders. There’s a bullet list where there should be subfolders and they’re just—blank lines. Like the labels are there, but the boxes are empty.”
Heat crawls up the back of my neck.
“Maybe IT migrated them?” I say. “New server? Cloud? Whatever they bragged about in that donor newsletter?”
“We would’ve had a rollout,” he says. “Trainings, memos, Evelyn on a podium talking about ‘the future of data stewardship.’ We had nothing. This is a purge.”
My knees wobble. I sink into Riley’s chair, the cushion cold under my thighs.
“Check backups,” I say. “The offsite ones. You said there were mirror servers in the hospital basement.”
“Working on it,” he mutters.
Clicks. The soft whoosh of a page loading.
“Accessing backup dashboard…” he narrates. “Primary mirror, check. Secondary—hang on, I need my token for this.”
I hear desk drawer sliders, the muted jangle of a key ring. Closing my eyes, I picture his office: framed degree, photo of Lydia on the beach, Mercer crest paperweight Evelyn bought him the first year he joined the foundation board.
“Token plugged in,” he says. “Two-factor code… okay, I’m in. Pulling directory tree.”
The silence stretches long enough that I hear the distant thump of a cleaning cart passing Riley’s door in the hallway outside, some other life going on with no idea what we’re doing.
“Jesus,” Daniel breathes.
My grip on the phone tightens.
“Tell me,” I say.
“The backup indexes are there,” he says. “But the files are corrupted. The system shows data taking up space, but the checksum logs are all flags and question marks. Somebody nuked content and left empty shells so it would look intact at a glance.”
The room tilts a little. I grab the edge of the desk.
“So she’s already been here,” I say. “In the code.”
He’s quiet for a heartbeat.
“Or she hired someone,” he says. “Either way, this isn’t an intern-level cleanup. This is precise.”
Anger slices through my fear, hot and clean.
“We knew she’d try to get ahead of us,” I say. “Riley said thirty-six hours.”
“She took twelve,” he answers. “And she started with the exact folders I told you we needed. That’s not random.”
The implication hangs between us. I force my brain to keep moving.
“What about other kinds of records?” I ask. “Emails, memos, legal invoices. She can’t have wiped everything.”
“I can try,” he says. “But if the financials are gone, the memos might be too. Still—there’s another angle.”
Paper rustles; I hear the shift of his chair.
“The logs,” he says. “Deletion events generate logs. Even if she scrubbed those, the audit software keeps its own. Think watchdog watching watchdog.”
A thin thread of hope pulls taut.
“Can you see who did it?” I ask.
“If I can get into the security console,” he says. “That’s technically IT’s playground, but exec-level accounts have read-only access for ‘oversight.’ Mom wanted to be able to quote audit numbers at board meetings.”
“Nice of her,” I mutter.
He doesn’t respond, but the clicking starts again, faster now. I imagine him navigating menus by muscle memory, taking turns in digital hallways he’s walked a hundred times.
“Security console,” he says under his breath. “System logs. Filter by action: delete, archive, migrate. Filter by date… last seventy-two hours.”
The heater in Riley’s office coughs and then settles. Outside, the harbor wind moans around the building.
“I’ve got a list,” he says. “Jesus, it’s long. Hang on, I’m sorting by account.”
My heart beats in my ears.
“Is there—”
“There it is,” he cuts in. “Admin account… timestamped yesterday afternoon. Bulk delete flagged. But that’s just the generic system account, not helpful on its own.”
“What about IP addresses?” I ask. “Or machine names?”
“Checking,” he says.
A pause. Then a low, disbelieving sound that makes my skin prickle.
“You’re not going to like this,” he says.
“Say it.”
“Most of the admin sessions are from an internal IP labeled SERVER-OPS,” he says. “But the purge one? It’s remote. A VPN endpoint with a device tag: EHart-ExecMac.”
For a second, I don’t understand the letters. Then they snap into place.
“E. Hart,” I repeat. “Your mother’s maiden name.”
“She uses it for her personal devices,” he says hoarsely. “She says it ‘keeps her grounded.’”
“So the deletion event came from her laptop,” I say. “Directly.”
My thumb is slick on the phone screen.
“Timestamp?” I ask.
His keyboard taps again.
“Yesterday, 3:12 p.m.,” he says. “Duration: thirty-four minutes. Location: offsite VPN, but the endpoint fingerprint matches the one she uses at the estate. She sat in that house and reached into this building and carved out the exact files we need.”
I stare at Riley’s map, at the red thread connecting the estate and the hospital and the foundation like veins. On the hill outside, their real-life counterparts glow, trading signals we’re only now decoding.
“Screenshot everything,” I say. “Every detail. IP, device, action, timestamp. If she wants to play surgeon, she can leave her fingerprints in the incision.”
“Already on it,” he says.
I hear rapid clicks, the faint digital shutter sound of screenshots snapping.
“I’m emailing them to a throwaway,” he adds. “Then forwarding to Riley’s encrypted account from there. If they monitor my foundation email, I don’t want this trail.”
“Good,” I say. “What about actual files? Is there anything left we can use besides the logs?”
He exhales, the sound fraying at the edges.
“I’m digging in the corrupted backup,” he says. “Sometimes when data gets wiped in a hurry, pointers break but chunks of content survive. Think shredded paper that still spells words if you line it up right.”
“Can you pull samples?” I ask.
“I can try,” he says.
Clacking. A muffled curse.
“What?” I ask.
“I’ve got fragments,” he says. “PDFs with half their pages, spreadsheets with missing rows. Nothing clean. But there are file names. Case codes. Phrases like ‘continuity stipend’ and ‘special placement.’ It’s like looking at a burned book.”
Pain pulses behind my eyes.
“Download everything,” I say. “We can let Riley and her friends play archivist. Even scraps are proof something was there.”
“Already queuing them,” he says. “This is going to look weird on the bandwidth logs, but at this point, subtlety is dead.”
A progress bar chimes quietly on his end.
“Ten minutes,” he mutters. “Maybe less if the connection stays fast.”
“You shouldn’t stay that long,” I say. “Security does rounds. Cleaning staff—”
“They clocked out at nine,” he interrupts. “Remember? Your first Light the Harbor parade, you snuck down here with me while my parents played yacht bingo. I showed you my office. You said it smelled like money and hand sanitizer.”
I swallow. The memory hits hard: boats lit up like floating jewelry, social hierarchy spelled out in who got invited aboard which deck, the Mercer crest on everything from flags to fleece blankets.
“I remember,” I say softly.
“It’s the same route tonight,” he says. “Except this time, if I get caught, my mother doesn’t pat my head. She calls Legal.”
“Then move,” I say. “You have the logs. You have fragments. That’s more than we had an hour ago. Don’t get greedy.”
Silence answers for a heartbeat, then his chair scrapes back.
“You’re right,” he says. “Downloads finished. I’m disconnecting.”
I hear the soft chime of a VPN closing, the low whine of a laptop lid being shut. His footsteps are heavier now.
“Walking out,” he narrates. “Office door. Hallway. Security camera over my head pretending not to see me.”
“Badge,” I demand.
The beep comes a second later, that flat little tone I’ve heard a hundred times at foundation events, now sharp enough to cut.
“Lobby,” he says. “Hi, donor wall. Bye, donor wall. I know exactly how many of you are going to call my mother when this hits the news.”
Automatic doors sigh open in my ear. The background noise shifts back to winter air: a distant horn on the water, tires on wet pavement, the muffled roar of the wind coming off the Sound.
“I’m outside,” he says.
My body loosens a notch I didn’t know it could.
“Come back,” I say. “We’ll back up everything before you even tell me the rest.”
“On my way,” he answers. “Ten minutes.”
The call drops to save battery. I sit in Riley’s chair and stare at the map, at the pin stuck through the foundation building where Daniel just pulled ghosts out of a machine his mother thought she owned.
The heater sighs. Somewhere down the hill, a gull cries once and is swallowed by the wind.
My screen lights up with new notifications: file_received_1.zip, logs_mercery_purge.png, backup_fragments.tar. Then a last image: a screenshot of a system console, Evelyn’s device tag highlighted in yellow, the word DELETE in a tidy, damning column.
My fingers hover over the files.
For years, people in Harbor Glen have pointed at the Mercer crest and talked about lives saved: babies in incubators, surgeries under bright lights, scholarships for kids who grew up with sirens instead of yacht horns. Love and harm braided together until no one wanted to pull them apart.
“What if the purge is the story,” I whisper into the empty room. “Not just what she erased, but that she chose erasing over everything those good deeds were supposed to stand for.”
The door handle rattles, and I jump before realizing it’s just my imagination, nerves firing ahead of reality. I check the time, counting down minutes until Daniel walks back through an actual door.
On the hill, the hospital’s windows glow steady. In the glass reflection, I catch my own face—tired, thinner, but steadier than I remember. Behind me, on the map, red thread runs from the estate to the foundation to the hospital, and now, invisibly, into the server logs in my email.
Daniel’s name flashes on my screen: arriving.
I stand and move toward the door.
We have less proof than we hoped for, more than Evelyn ever meant to leave, and a new question that chills me more than the Harbor Glen wind: if she’s already scrubbing her history from the machines, what parts of us is she planning to erase next?