Harbor House After Dark

The footage is enough for Nico to justify a records preservation demand. It is not enough for a full search warrant before somebody at the attorney general's office warns Vivian. So that night, while Nico works official channels, I do something less defensible and more effective: I follow the side gate code Poppy remembers from volunteer days and let Callum drive me to Harbor House.

The building looks wholesome in the moonlight, brick and ivy and donor plaques pretending nobody ever cried in those rooms. Harbor House sits three streets from the lake and fifteen worlds from the girls it claimed to rescue. The side entrance opens with the old keypad sequence on the second try. Inside, the hall smells like lemon polish over old panic.

Callum stays on lookout while I move through the administrative wing using my phone flashlight low. The memory-card footage showed Owen, Tessa, and Nina entering a locked office beside the counseling rooms. The office still exists. So does the lock, though the key in the boathouse photograph turns out to fit it perfectly.

The room beyond is not a counseling archive. It is a ledger room. Metal cabinets line three walls, not alphabetized by resident name but by donor household. Each drawer carries a family code and a year. Inside are intake notes, private letters, rehab invoices, pregnancy scares, assault complaints, hush agreements, and copies of checks. Protection, Greybridge style. Shame turned into filing infrastructure.

I open the drawer marked H-04 expecting Hart records. Instead I find a series of photos clipped together: wealthy daughters entering Harbor House through the back gate, prominent sons leaving with staff escorts, Nina Baird's typed memo requesting outside review, and at the bottom, a draft press statement in Owen's old campaign font.

Harbor House remains committed to discreet family stabilization.

Discreet family stabilization. The phrase reads like hand sanitizer poured over a crime scene. My phone camera flashes once by accident as I copy the pages. Somewhere in the corridor, a floorboard answers with a creak.

"Sloane," Callum hisses from the doorway. "You have maybe thirty seconds."

I grab one entire folder at random and turn. A red light blinks above the office door I am leaving. Not camera. Silent alarm.