Page 116 of In the Dark of the Past

Sean’s hands were flat on the desk now. Not gripping, just present.

“Grant filed a complaint against me this morning,” I said. “He’s trying to discredit the source before the evidence lands. If you’re in his corner when it reaches the AG, you’ll go down with him. If you’re not—” I paused. “You have real culpability, Sean. I’m not going to tell you otherwise. But there’s a difference between the man who built this thing and the man who got trapped in it and stayed too long.”

He looked at me.

“What are you offering?” he said.

“I’m not offering anything. I’m not the AG. I’m not a prosecutor. I can’t make you a deal.” I held his gaze. “What I’m telling you is that if you go to the AG’s office voluntarily, with counsel, and you give them everything—Grant’s name, the full structure of the Fund, every authorization you signed and why, every person you know was targeted—it’s a different conversation than if they come to you after the evidence lands. You know how it works.”

He did. He’d been a DA for six years and a lawyer for longer. He knew exactly what voluntary cooperation looked like versus extraction.

“Twenty-four hours,” I said. “I’m filing with the AG at nine. That gives you until nine tomorrow morning. After that, whatever you choose, you’ve chosen.”

Sean stared at the evidence bag.

Then at the phone.

Then at me.

In that moment, he looked less like the DA of Maple Ridge and more like the person he’d been before all of this. Before the office, before Grant, before the first authorization he signed and told himself was pragmatism. He looked like my brother. Older than he should be, sure and tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, but still my family.

“You came here alone,” he said. “Why?”

“Because this conversation is between us,” I said. “Whatever you decide, you decide it here and now, not in a room full of people watching you perform.”

His throat moved.

“River’s name was really on that list?” he said quietly.

“Yes.”

“If I’d known⁠—”

“You didn’t want to know,” I said. “That’s different from not knowing.”

He absorbed that and didn’t try to refute it.

I picked up my cell and the evidence bag. “Twenty-four hours,” I said. “Get a lawyer tonight. A real one, not one who’s county connected. Someone who doesn’t know Grant’s name.”

I walked to the door.

“Finn,” he called.

I stopped, but didn’t turn.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know that’s—” He stopped. “I know it doesn’t do anything. But I am.”

I stood in the doorway for a moment.

“Call the lawyer,” I said and left.

The morning was gray and cold. I stood on the sidewalk outside the DA’s office and looked at the building across the street—the civic center with its bronze plaque on the wall, memorializing the founding families of Maple Ridge, showing the names of the men who had decided what this town was and what it owed them.

Grant’s father’s name was on that plaque. So was his grandfather’s.

Sean had walked past it every day for six years.

I thought about what it would have cost him to refuse in that first week, when Grant came to him with the arrangement and the pragmatism and the it’s how things actually work speech. I thought about whether a different version of Sean—harder and less afraid—would have refused. I didn’t know. I’d never been in that situation. I’d never had that choice offered to me, with the implicit threat sitting underneath it.