“Detective? Is she awake?”
My father’s voice came through the phone so quickly that Lena Ortiz and I looked at each other.
He had been waiting for news.
Ortiz kept her tone flat.
“She’s awake.
The doctors are seeing signs of significant memory disruption.
She appears to remember almost nothing surrounding the fire.”
There was a pause.
Not long enough for anyone else to notice.
Long enough for me.
Then my father exhaled.
“God,” he said.
“That poor girl.”
Poor girl.
I was lying beneath hospital sheets with smoke damage in my lungs and my mother dead, and the first clear emotion I’d heard from him all morning was relief.
Ortiz ended the call after telling him the doctors wanted me kept calm.
Then she placed the phone face down.
“He’ll come back,” I said.
“Probably.”
“Good.”
Ortiz studied me for a moment.
“You don’t have to do this.
We already have enough to keep investigating him.”
I looked at the evidence folder on my blanket.
“Investigating isn’t the same as understanding why he did it.”
That was the part I couldn’t release.
The footage proved he had left before the explosion.
The gas line showed deliberate sabotage.
The ignition point told investigators the fire had been engineered instead of born from some random household failure.
But evidence can explain how a crime happened without explaining the person who chose it.
I had spent years learning that distinction.
Financial crimes rarely began with numbers.
Numbers were what people left behind after fear, greed, humiliation, or desperation had already made the decision for them.
I asked Ortiz what they had found in my father’s finances.
Her expression changed.
“We were going to wait until you were stronger.”
“I’m strong enough.”
She opened the folder again.
Six weeks before the fire, the insurance coverage on our home had been increased substantially.
Four weeks before the fire, money had begun moving out of an account my parents shared.
Not in one dramatic transfer.
That would have been obvious.
Smaller withdrawals.
Different amounts.
Different days.
A pattern designed to look ordinary.
I almost laughed, but nothing about it was funny.
The pattern was amateur work disguised as sophistication.
My father had varied the amounts but repeated the timing.
Every transfer landed within hours of another obligation coming due somewhere else.
Debt payments.
Private accounts.
Money moving in circles because someone was trying to keep several problems alive at once.
“My mother knew,” I said.
Ortiz didn’t answer immediately.
