At dinner, Danny asked whether the search was finally over.
Emily looked at the letter from Tessa.
“For Peter, the search belongs to him now,” she said.
“For the records, there’s still work.”
Danny set his fork down.
“You don’t have to carry every family’s grief.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Emily hesitated.
She had spent months treating rest as a betrayal of those still waiting for answers.
She was beginning to understand that exhaustion could make her careless with the very people she wanted to help.
“I’m trying to learn,” she said.
Danny reached across the table and squeezed her hand.
For once, he did not make a joke to hide how worried he was.
Chapter Seventeen: A Paper Trail With Teeth
The independent review of Mercer Roadside Group began in a rented office above a pharmacy.
The review team included accountants, archivists, and an attorney selected jointly by family representatives and the company.
Emily had no official authority over their work.
She served on an advisory panel with Walter and two other former shelter volunteers.
The arrangement gave her a voice without making her responsible for decisions that required professional expertise.
The first serious discovery concerned Eastward’s payment structure.
The contractor billed the company for each child transported and charged additional fees for days spent in temporary placement.
The invoices used numbers rather than names.
Several payments continued after the corresponding children had left the recorded facilities.
The review team could not immediately determine whether those charges represented fraud or badly maintained records.
It could determine that no one had reconciled them against actual placements at the time.
Julian attended the panel meeting where the finding was presented.
He listened without trying to explain away the error.
A former finance manager named Paula Ivers described how emergency invoices had been approved in bulk to keep services running.
She had raised questions about repeat charges but was told the humanitarian urgency outweighed the accounting risk.
“I thought the money was buying beds for children,” she said.
“If I had stopped the payments, I worried the beds would disappear.”
Walter asked whether anyone checked that the beds existed.
Paula lowered her eyes.
“No.”
The admission angered several families, but it also explained how a dishonest contractor could hide behind a genuine crisis.
Eastward had been able to present every question as a threat to vulnerable people.
Emily recognized the pattern from Victor’s accusation at the diner.
An act of ordinary care had been recast as a danger to paying customers.
