Chapter 2 - THE FIRST STOLEN LINE
Rowan did not go home.
She entered a crowded coffee shop, took a seat near the back exit, and watched the black car through the fogged window.
It stopped across the street.
No one got out.
Rowan called Milo again.
“You’re going to tell me I’m being paranoid,” she said.
“Probably. Explain first.”
She described the car.
Milo asked for the license plate.
“The rain is covering it.”
“Take a photograph.”
Rowan raised her phone discreetly. Before she could focus, the car pulled into traffic and disappeared.
“Did you get anything?” Milo asked.
“Only the rear light.”
“Send it anyway.”
By evening, Milo had enhanced the image enough to identify part of a municipal access sticker on the windshield.
The vehicle belonged either to a city contractor or someone authorized to enter restricted government sites.
“That narrows it down to several thousand people,” Rowan said.
“It also means the person watching you was not hiding as carefully as they thought.”
They were in Milo’s apartment, surrounded by computer screens, cables, storage drives, and stacks of archival boxes. Rowan’s sketches lay beneath a protective lamp.
Milo scanned each page at high resolution, generated digital fingerprints, and uploaded encrypted copies to three separate servers.
“Now,” he said, “if someone steals the physical drawings, you can prove when these existed.”
“Can a timestamp be challenged?”
“Anything can be challenged. But these are independently verified. To fake all three, someone would need access to systems in different countries.”
“Could Audrey do that?”
“Audrey cannot remember her own passwords.”
“Her father can hire people.”
Milo glanced at her.
“That is a different question.”
Conrad Vale had built his fortune buying neglected land before city redevelopment projects were publicly announced. Rumors of political influence followed him, but investigations never produced charges.
Rowan’s father had believed Conrad was connected to the Bellweather fire.
He had never proved it.
At midnight, Milo enlarged Rowan’s central sketch.
“What is this?” he asked.
He pointed to a tiny symbol hidden beneath the base of one pillar.
Rowan leaned closer.
It resembled a half circle crossed by three vertical lines.
“I didn’t draw that.”
“You must have.”
“I know every line on that page.”
Milo checked the original paper.
The symbol was there in pencil, faint but unmistakable.
“Maybe it transferred from another sheet,” he suggested.
Rowan opened her father’s old notebook and turned through the pages.
Near the back, beside a list of names associated with the Bellweather property sale, she found the same symbol.
Below it, her father had written two words.
Elara knew.
Rowan stared at the sentence until the letters blurred.
Her sister had been seventeen when she died. Elara volunteered at the community hall and helped organize the charity concert. According to the official report, she had been trapped near the western exit.
But Rowan’s father had circled inconsistencies in the witness accounts.
One firefighter claimed no body had been found in that section.
The city identified Elara through a silver bracelet recovered from the rubble.
Rowan had never seen the body.
Her mother had refused to discuss it.
“Milo,” Rowan whispered, “what if this symbol was added recently?”
He examined the paper under magnification.
“The pressure marks seem fresh. Maybe days old.”
“Someone touched my sketchbook.”
“Where have you taken it?”
“My apartment. The bridge. The public archive.”
“And your mother’s house?”
Rowan hesitated.
Three days earlier, she had visited her mother, Miriam, and left the sketchbook in the kitchen while answering a call outside.
Miriam lived alone in a narrow townhouse filled with objects she refused to replace. She kept Elara’s room locked and maintained that grief should not be investigated.
“Your mother would not alter your design,” Milo said.
“No.”
But Rowan remembered something from that visit.
A second cup had been sitting beside the sink.
Her mother claimed it was left over from breakfast.
The coffee had still been warm.
At one in the afternoon.
Before Rowan could say more, Milo’s computer chimed.
Someone had attempted to access one of the newly uploaded files.
The request came from an internal account connected to the Memorial Development Council.
May you like
The username was A.Vale.
Audrey had tried to open Rowan’s design less than four minutes after it was uploaded.
