The email lands with the same bright mechanical chime that tells me someone in Maple Hollow has posted another angelversary collage or complained about a trash can.
I jump anyway.
My laptop screen throws a harsh rectangle of white across the dining table, bleaching the ring of coffee at my elbow and the half-folded HOA letter about lawn length. Outside the window, fog drapes the cul-de-sac so low that the next car’s headlights smear across the glass in two long, trembling streaks.
A notification bubble slides into the corner of my screen.
FROM: “patternwatch@protonmail.com”
SUBJECT: VANTAGE – YOU’RE NOT DONE
I swallow against a dry throat and click.
The body of the email is short, clipped, like my own notes when I’m trying not to think too hard about what I’m writing.
You’re right to look at Vantage.
Attached: internal frm 6 mths post-crash. Redactions mine.
Don’t request footage through official channels. They’ll know where you’re looking.
You’re not the only one who sees the pattern.
No greeting. No sign-off. A single attachment: memo_redacted.pdf.
Micro-hook: if I’m not the only one who sees the pattern, then whoever sent this is standing somewhere on the same rope I’m hanging from.
I stare at the screen long enough for my eyes to start burning. The hum of the distant freeway drifts in through the walls, a low, constant shiver, like the world clearing its throat.
“Okay,” I whisper to the empty room. My voice comes out scratchy. “Let’s see what you risked for me.”
I click the attachment.
The PDF opens in a new window, the edges of my browser darkening around it. Heavy black rectangles march across the page in thick bars, censoring full paragraphs, names, half a header. The remaining text is dense legalese, all “data retention protocols” and “litigation hold implementation.”
My pulse kicks.
At the top, unredacted, I read: Keene Ellison Cho LLP – Internal Memorandum.
Ellison.
Jonah’s name sits right there, welded to the firm he crawled up through, the one whose NDA I haven’t confronted him about yet. My last name, too, though I only use it on tax forms now.
I scroll. The trackpad is slick under my fingertips.
Midway down, one sentence remains intact between bars of blackout ink:
Per outside counsel’s request, VANTAGE DATA SOLUTIONS will preserve all traffic camera footage from Old Willow Road (MP 14–16) commencing 30 days prior to Incident #C-7824 and continuing 90 days post-incident.
My breath hitches. They flagged the road on purpose, held the footage, kept it safe. Not for me. For themselves.
At the bottom, right before another wall of black, I catch a final, surviving line:
Note: client expresses concern regarding “uncontrolled narrative risk.”
Narrative risk. Me.
I lean back, chair creaking. The room feels too loud—the fridge’s soft buzz, the faint tick of the kitchen clock, a car door slamming somewhere down the street. I peek past the edge of the curtain. Across the cul-de-sac, several windows glow: curated Maple Hollow rectangles, each one another little screen performing its grief, its normalcy.
How many of those windows are watching mine?
I drag the PDF window bigger, needing more room to breathe inside it. As I do, the image quality shifts, the text blurring for a second before snapping back. This isn’t a native digital file, I realize. It’s a scan. Someone printed this and then photographed or scanned it.
The paper on the screen has a faint sheen.
I zoom in farther, to 150%, then 200%. The letters get grainier at the edges, but something else sharpens—a ghostly rectangle along the top margin, a faint band of light that doesn’t belong to the memo.
“What are you,” I murmur, inching the zoom up again.
At 300%, the band resolves into more than light. It’s a reflection, faint and distorted, like a photo of a page lying on a glass table. Above the black bars, in the white part of the “paper,” I can see a stretch of ceiling and what looks like the curve of a wall.
And in the center, tiny but unmistakable, a sculpture.
Micro-hook: my life may be falling apart, but my eye for set dressing still works.
It’s a vertical piece, tall and narrow, composed of twisting glass rods encased in a clear column. Even in the warped reflection, the shapes stack in a spiral, like a frozen tornado. White lobby lights glint off the jagged edges, sending bright points into the camera.
My stomach drops with the recognition.
I’ve stood in front of that sculpture a dozen times, waiting for Jonah to walk me past security. Caleb used to call it “the frozen jellyfish tornado” and roll his eyes at how many billable hours it probably cost.
It lives in the lobby of Keene Ellison Cho.
My thumb finds a divot in the wood of the table where someone once pressed a pen too hard. I press back, digging in, grounding myself.
The anonymous memo wasn’t just leaked from Jonah’s firm. It was physically handled in their lobby.
I zoom again, now curious about everything the reflection holds. To the left of the sculpture, I catch a flicker of movement frozen in that moment: part of a shoulder, a hint of a jawline, the edge of a phone raised above the page. The photographer.
The face is mostly out of frame, but the jaw looks narrow, the hair short and dark, the lapel of the blazer slim-cut. I squint, nudging brightness and contrast sliders in the PDF viewer until the image edges turn harsh.
Grainy, but still there. Not Jonah. Too slight, too young.
The freeway hum feels closer now, like it has pushed up under the house and started rattling the floor joists. I fight the urge to shut the laptop and walk away.
Instead, I right-click and save the PDF, then open the file info window. My fingers tremble enough to make the cursor wobble.
Title: memo_redacted
Author: dcho
Application: ScanPro Office 4.2
Creation Date: six months after Caleb’s death.
“Dcho,” I whisper. “Not exactly stealthy, friend.”
A thrill cuts through the dread, quick and sharp. Whoever “patternwatch” is, they’re sloppy in their own way. Or confident enough that no one at the firm checks metadata.
Micro-hook: if they’re careless here, maybe they’re desperate.
I open a browser tab and type the firm’s name. The site loads in sleek navy and white, all looming cityscapes and smiling professionals. A subtle animation draws the eye to their tagline about “shaping the future of infrastructure.”
My hands feel too hot on the keys.
I click Our People.
Headshots arrange into a grid: rows of confident faces in tasteful blazers, each name tucked underneath in clean sans-serif fonts. Partners first, then senior counsel, then associates.
I scroll past Jonah’s headshot quickly, refusing to let my gaze snag on his familiar half-smile, the one he practiced in the bathroom mirror before our first Christmas party there. I don’t need to feel any softer than I already do.
Under ASSOCIATES, the names march in alphabetical order. I skim until I find it.
Dana Cho – Associate.
I click.
Her bio opens in a new pane. The headshot shows a woman in her early thirties, if that: Korean-American, clear brown eyes, hair in a straight bob just brushing her jaw. The blazer lapel is slim-cut, like in the reflection. In the background of the photo, slightly out of focus, stands the glass tornado sculpture.
I look back at the tiny reflected jawline on the memo. Same angle. Same hair length.
“Hi, Dana,” I whisper to the pixels. “Welcome to my nightmare.”
My phone buzzes on the table, startling me hard enough that I nearly knock my mug over.
I grab it. A text from Jonah: You up? Need to ask you something about the mortgage notice.
Of course he texts now.
I stare at the message while his firm’s logo shines on my laptop and Dana’s face watches me from the side of the screen. Parts of my life I keep in separate folders suddenly live in the same window.
My thumbs hover. I consider ignoring him. But ignoring Jonah has never gone well for either of us.
Yeah. At the desk, I type back. What’s going on?
The typing dots appear, disappear, appear again. I picture him in that same building I just toured virtually, maybe downstairs from the lobby sculpture, maybe walking past Dana without knowing she peels his firm’s secrets loose at night.
Just saw another notice about the refinance offer. he texts. Can we talk tomorrow? Didn’t want you blindsided.
I stare at the words until they double. Refinancing. Paperwork. Normal life try-hard jargon creeping under the door while I’m busy chasing ghosts in PDFs.
Tomorrow’s fine, I write. Text me a time.
I don’t ask whether he’s still at the office, whether he knows a junior associate who uses “dcho” as a handle. I don’t ask if his firm is the one warning off terrified kids who see too much in memos.
My chest tightens. I set the phone face down so the glow doesn’t keep dragging my eyes away.
On the laptop, Dana’s bio lists her focus areas: “infrastructure litigation, data governance, complex discovery.” She clerked for a federal judge, graduated law school with honors, wrote a note on ethical obligations in data-driven cases.
The words “ethical obligations” make my lip curl.
“How’s that going for you, Dana?” I ask the screen quietly. “Is this your conscience or your rebellion?”
I scroll. At the bottom of the page, a glossy firm group photo appears: a dozen associates gathered in the lobby around the sculpture. Jonah stands near the back, slightly taller, an arm folded over his chest. Dana is front row, hands clasped, smiling just enough.
The photograph tightens my throat. Caleb stood in that frame once, when he was twelve, on Bring Your Kid to Work Day. He made a joke about the sculpture looking like it was made of frozen noodles, and Jonah laughed too loudly, wanting the partners to see what a fun dad he was.
That memory presses against a newer one: the line from the memo about “uncontrolled narrative risk.”
Me.
I click back to the email.
You’re not the only one who sees the pattern.
I picture Dana taking the memo to the glass table, angling the page just right, lifting her phone above it. The lobby empty except for the security guard half-watching the screens. Her heart beating too fast, fingers slick on the phone case. She saves the image, runs it through a scanner app, blacks out what she thinks will protect her, and sends it off to a grieving stranger she has never met.
Does she know that stranger is married to her boss?
My gaze drifts to the front window again. The fog outside is thicker now, swallowing the nearest streetlamp, leaving only a halo of damp light. A car creeps up the hill, its headlights smearing across the glass, slicing through my reflection. For a moment, my own face overlays the laptop screen: me, split between the ghost in the window and the ghost in the PDF.
Every pane of glass in my life feels like a lens pointed at me: the bodycam, the traffic camera, Liam’s monitors, Jonah’s firm lobby.
And now, Dana’s phone.
Micro-hook: the more I dig, the more it feels like I’m walking across a room where every picture frame hides a camera.
I drag the memo into a folder labeled JONAH FIRM – LEAKS and back it up to an encrypted drive. Then I open a blank document.
At the top, I type:
Who benefits from Dana staying hidden?
Who benefits from her being exposed?
I stare at the questions until my eyes sting.
If I push this memo into the light—if I take it to Ruiz later, or to a reporter, or into court someday—discovery will chew through every byte of its history. A competent defense team will do exactly what I just did: check metadata, zoom in on reflections, match jawlines to headshots.
They’ll trace the leak straight back to her.
I press my palms over my eyes until dots burst behind them. The faint scent of paper and ink and cold coffee fills my nose. Maple Hollow’s distant freeway hum puddles under everything, steady and indifferent.
“You’re not the only one who sees the pattern,” I repeat under my breath. “But I might be the one who decides what happens to the person who sent it.”
My phone lights again, another little square of attention in the dark room. This time it’s the neighborhood app: someone posting grainy footage of kids sneaking out to the reservoir, the caption full of outrage and the comments full of performative concern.
Everyone wants to watch. No one wants to really see.
I look back at Dana’s face on my screen, then at Jonah’s, then at my own faint reflection hovering over both.
The betrayal hits from an angle I didn’t prepare for. It’s not Jonah directly lying to me through a contract or Liam nudging my memories with a soft voice. It’s someone in Jonah’s orbit, slipping me pieces of his world behind his back, trusting me to use them against him and his clients.
I don’t know yet whether that makes her my ally or my next casualty.
I move the cursor back to the blank document and add one more line at the top, in bold:
Do I warn Jonah about the leak—or protect the leak from Jonah?
The question sits there, pulsing quietly in the glow of the screen, while outside my window the fog presses closer and the cul-de-sac windows stare back like unblinking eyes.