The baby drank with desperate concentration.

Marlene bowed over her daughter and closed her eyes.

Miles looked away to give her that privacy, but he still heard the breath she let out.

It was not a sob exactly.

It was the sound a person made when disaster stepped back one inch.

Only after Juniper had finished half the bottle and gone heavy with sleepy relief did Marlene seem to remember there was a stranger in her apartment.

She stood, shoulders stiff again.

She thanked him, quietly and formally, the way someone thanks a debt collector for extra time.

Then she asked the obvious question.

Why would you do this?

Miles set the grocery bags on the table.

He told her the truth because anything polished would sound false in that room.

He said the text had reached him by accident.

He said his mother had raised him alone.

He said some messages were impossible to ignore.

Marlene listened without softening.

Then she looked at the groceries, at the formula, at the business card he placed on the table, and asked a better question.

What do you want from me?

He respected her for that.

He told her he wanted nothing that night.

He said she could throw the card away in the morning if she chose.

But before he left, he asked whether Barton Ledger had fired her because she had found something they did not want found.

Her entire body changed at the name.

It was subtle.

A tightening of the mouth.

A lift of the chin.

Fear arriving before words.

She did not answer immediately.

Instead she asked how he knew where she worked.

He told her he had asked for public records after receiving the text, partly to make sure he was not walking into a scam, partly because he needed to know whether the situation was real.

He admitted that Barton was known to him.

He admitted he had questions about them already.

Marlene stared at him for a long time.

Then, maybe because he was already there, maybe because hunger had stripped away her ability to pretend, she sat down and told him everything.

She had been a staff accountant in internal reconciliation.

Boring, invisible work, which was exactly why she was good at it.

She noticed details.

She found patterns.

In September, while cross-checking monthly disbursements, she saw recurring payments to two vendors no one in her unit could identify.

The amounts were always just below the threshold that triggered extra review.

The invoice descriptions were generic enough to pass on a quick glance.

When she dug one layer deeper, she found that the addresses on file belonged to mailbox stores.

She flagged the entries to her supervisor.

The next morning she was told to drop it.

She did not.

A week later, she saw similar transfers linked to a housing-services grant account.

Another week after that, one of the shell vendors appeared in a report associated with emergency-family services funding.

She asked again.

This time HR called her in before lunch and told her her position had been eliminated as part of restructuring.

Her laptop was confiscated before she could pull her work notes.

Miles asked the question that mattered.

Did you keep anything?

She laughed once, bitterly.

Then she stood, crossed the