Her employer said the company was investigating possible disclosure of confidential records and instructed her to participate in an interview.
Priya advised her to request the specific allegations and the applicable policies before attending.
Jessica wanted to march into Richard’s office and accuse him of destroying Peter’s evidence.
Priya told her that outrage was not a plan, especially while her income and credibility were at risk.
Jessica agreed to wait, though the waiting made her feel trapped in a life she had helped construct.
At the repair shop, Daniel found a red pickup parked in the alley behind Luis’s building.
The driver watched him unload tools, then started the engine when Daniel glanced over.
Daniel wrote down the license plate as the truck left.
Luis reviewed his security camera, which showed the pickup entering the alley twice in the same afternoon.
Neither man knew whether the vehicle had anything to do with Richard.
They saved the footage, then agreed to avoid speculating publicly.
That evening Rebecca arrived from Hartford.
She had taken three days off work after Daniel admitted he had not been sleeping.
She found him at Luis’s kitchen table surrounded by legal pads and untouched food.
Without asking permission she made him a sandwich, placed it beside his notebook, and waited until he ate half.
He told her he felt foolish for being surprised by the affair and even more foolish for caring about the old Saint Alden case when his marriage was collapsing.
“Those are two losses,” she said.
“You don’t have to choose which one deserves your attention.”
Rebecca asked whether he wanted to see a counselor.
Daniel said yes, though he had been postponing it.
She found a local practice with a therapist who specialized in betrayal and stress.
Daniel made an appointment.
It felt like another administrative task until he admitted to Rebecca that he had begun checking the bedroom clock whenever he woke up, convinced that he should have noticed the hour Jessica returned home.
Rebecca said those hours were not evidence of his failure.
They were hours Jessica had hidden from him.
On Friday Mara brought them a breakthrough from the older court archive.
A supplemental witness list named Theodore Marquez, the younger boy beside Peter in the camp photograph.
Theo had survived the fire and later moved with his family to New Mexico.
The list included a short sealed statement referenced in an administrative order.
The statement itself was still restricted, but the order described Theo as a witness who reported being directed through a maintenance tunnel by an unidentified teenage resident.
