One evening, her younger sister Maya arrived at Olivia's apartment carrying takeout noodles and a tired smile. Maya was a reporter for the Milfield Gazette, where she had developed a reputation for asking city officials questions they wished had never occurred to her. She was two years younger than Olivia, impatient where Olivia was methodical, and capable of making an entire dinner conversation sound like an interview without once opening her notebook. She put the food down and looked at the folders covering Olivia's table.
"You're doing it again," Maya said. "You're trying to carry the whole town by yourself."
"Somebody has to carry the paperwork," Olivia replied. She moved a stack of files so Maya could sit, then reached for the chopsticks. "It's less dramatic than what you do."
Maya glanced at the photographs arranged beside a list of dates. "If the same officers are connected to all these people, why hasn't anyone said anything publicly?"
"People have," Olivia said. "They've been saying it in complaints, hearing rooms, and interviews for years. The question is why nobody with authority has treated those statements as worth investigating."
They ate beneath the yellow kitchen light and spoke about their father, which they usually did only when one of them had reached the limit of pretending not to think about him. Thomas had owned a little cabin outside town near a stream where he took the girls fishing each summer. Maya still kept his old tackle box in her closet, unwilling to give away anything that smelled faintly of tobacco-free mint gum and lake water. Olivia had kept his wristwatch, a scratched but dependable mechanical watch she wore on difficult court days.
"He would tell you to eat something that didn't come out of a takeout carton," Maya said.
"He'd say that while eating crackers over a stack of reports."
They both laughed, and for a minute he was simply their father again rather than a disputed death certificate and a stain on public records. The feeling passed, leaving affection and grief side by side. Before Maya went home, Olivia handed her a sealed envelope and asked her to keep it among their father's things until she was told otherwise.
"What's in it?" Maya asked.
"Instructions if somebody starts trying to make my work disappear."
Maya's smile vanished. "Olivia, what have you gotten yourself into?"
"Something I intend to finish carefully," Olivia replied. "But carefully doesn't always mean safely."
On the Tuesday night of her arrest, Olivia left the office later than she had planned. Rain had begun just before sunset, rolling in from the west until the streetlights looked like fuzzy yellow halos through her windshield. She was tired after a difficult bail hearing and still thinking about a teenage client who needed a treatment placement instead of another night in detention. Her phone buzzed at a red light with a message from Maya asking whether she was still coming for Sunday dinner.