Chapter 6: The Fob
Julian’s gate fob died at 9:12 the next morning, deactivated without ceremony while he was still mid-voicemail about “family process” and “rash optics.”
Spencer listened to the message once in the library, then forwarded it to Victor without reply. Optics had not kept a newborn warm against a service wall. Process, the real kind, lived in court stamps, lab chain-of-custody forms, and the slow grind of a prosecutor’s interest once a dumpster and a clinic theft shared a timeline.
Casey arrived for the daily check-in with a tablet and a careful smile for Charlee. Charlee demonstrated that Dexter could grip a finger and that she had learned the bottle ratios from Mabel without being asked twice. Casey noted the bonding, the clean bassinet, the absence of chaos that donors sometimes expected from sudden guardianship. “You’re doing better than the emergency handbook assumes,” she told Spencer.
“I’m doing what the letter required,” he said. “Everything after that is logistics.”
Logistics included a private nurse on twelve-hour rotations, a pediatric appointment where Dexter’s weight was declared stubbornly adequate, and a security contractor who rebuilt the service-alley camera angles so cardboard boxes could no longer arrive like mail. The contractor’s report confirmed the mudded-plate sedan had paused nineteen seconds—long enough to set a burden down, not long enough to look like a man unsure of his crime.
Victor’s investigator matched a gas-station still two miles away: same sedan, clearer plate, registered to a shell LLC that had paid a consulting invoice to a firm Julian used for “discreet errands.” Discreet was a word that had always meant dirty in Spencer’s experience. He authorized a civil preservation letter that landed on Julian’s attorney’s desk like a stone through glass.
Charlee found him in the study after dark, teddy bear under one arm. “If Julian is bad, does that make the whole family bad?”
May you like
Spencer closed the laptop. “It makes some choices bad. You’re family by blood and by what you did in the rain. Those are different proofs. Both count here.”
She nodded, satisfied enough to sleep. Spencer remained awake, tracing the password’s shadow through twelve years of assumed sterility, and felt the mansion’s quiet rearrange itself around two children breathing down the hall.
