“Shut your mouth right now,” Adrian threatened, his eyes wide with wild, feral terror. “You tell him you were confused. You tell him you made a mistake about the money. If you don’t fix this right now, I swear to God I will take that baby, I will declare you an unfit, psychotic mother, and I will have you committed to a state psych ward before midnight. You will never see him again.”
Lena didn’t flinch. Her heart rate didn’t elevate. She didn’t cower against the wall.
For three years, Adrian and his family had treated her like a helpless, uneducated “charity case.” They believed that because she came from a working-class background, because she wore thrift-store coats and spoke quietly, she was inherently stupid. They believed her silence was a symptom of submission.
They were catastrophically wrong.
Lena gently shifted her sleeping newborn, cradling his fragile head securely against her shoulder. With her free hand, she reached deep into the side pocket of her faded, cheap canvas diaper bag.
She didn’t pull out a pacifier. She didn’t pull out a tissue to wipe away tears.
Lena pulled out a thick, black, heavily encrypted external hard drive. Wrapped around it with a thick rubber band was a dense stack of printed, highlighted, and meticulously annotated bank routing ledgers.
Adrian stared at the hard drive, the color draining from his face.
