Sarah's Deep Dive

Caleb.

His hand remains clamped on my arm, the heat of his skin searing through my sleeve. I stare at the floor, watching a stray droplet of orange juice roll toward the base of the island. My heart is a frantic, trapped bird, beating against the cage of my ribs so hard I’m sure he can feel the vibration.

"I'm just tired, David," I whisper, refusing to look up. "The migration, the kids... I mixed up the schedules. Please let go."

He exhales, a sharp, ragged sound, and releases me. He doesn't apologize. He simply turns back to the counter, his movements stiff and mechanical. I don't wait for him to finish his breakfast. I grab my keys and my bag, mumbling something about a library book that’s overdue, and flee.

I don't go to the library. I drive three towns over to a crowded Starbucks and pull out my laptop. I need Sarah. I need the person who knows how to move through the dark spaces of the internet without leaving a trail.

I send the encrypted ping. *I found him. Caleb was a foster brother. He survived the fire.*

Sarah’s reply is instantaneous. *Meet me at the coworking space in twenty. Don't use the house Wi-Fi again. Ever.*

When I arrive, Sarah is already tucked into a corner booth, her face illuminated by the harsh white glare of three different monitors. She looks like she hasn't slept, her eyes bloodshot and her hair pulled into a messy, frantic knot.

"Clara, look at me," she says, her voice a low, urgent hum. "If I do this, we are crossing a line. Eleanor has deep-packet inspection on the foundation's hardware. If I ping the state's juvenile justice database, it might trigger a silent alarm in Marcus’s office."

"I have to know, Sarah. I’m living with a dead boy’s ghost. My children are named after a corpse."

Sarah bites her lip, then nods once. Her fingers blur across the keys, a staccato rhythm that sounds like rain on a tin roof. She isn't searching for a name anymore; she’s looking for the absence of one. She’s looking for the records that were supposed to be destroyed.

"The 1998 files are sequestered," Sarah murmurs, her eyes scanning lines of scrolling green text. "But they didn't purge the intake logs at the county level. They just... hid them behind a broken link."

She clicks a final command. A single window populates on the screen. It’s a scan of a handwritten ledger from the Hillview intake desk, dated six months after the fire.

*Subject: Caleb (No Surname). D.O.B: 10/12/1981.*

I lean in, my breath fogging the screen. "Is there a case file? A charge?"

Sarah’s cursor hovers over a blue alphanumeric string. "This is a sealed juvenile record. It takes a master key to crack the encryption, but the metadata... the summary tags are still there."

She hits the enter key. The summary loads, a single line of text that recontextualizes every memory I have of my husband. The man I thought was a victim. The man David Vance became.

The charge on the sealed record wasn't theft. It was arson resulting in death.