Chapter 1 The Files
My mother was sick so of course, like any responsible son, I turned to crime.
Not violent crime though.
Relax.
I wasn’t selling organs behind Chinese restaurants or anything dramatic. Mostly scams. Loopholes. Digital gymnastics. Helping rich idiots hide money from richer idiots. Occasionally convincing insurance companies to fear me through strongly worded AI-generated emails.
Honestly, half the stuff I did would’ve been legal if somebody in a suit thought of it first.
The police lights behind me flashed blue across the wet pavement while I cut through an alley that smelled like weed, hot garbage, and bad financial decisions.
Which usually meant one of two things:
somebody diedsomebody saw me
And considering I had just walked out of a police department basement carrying stolen archived records in a fake maintenance uniform, I had a pretty good guess.
“You’re moving emotionally right now,” ChatGPT said through my airpods.
I almost slipped on a beer bottle.
“Can you stop talking like a divorced therapist and tell me how to escape?”
“Legally?”
“No, spiritually.”
Somewhere behind me a cop yelled:
“STOP RUNNING.”
Which always felt disrespectful honestly.
Like let’s not pretend this is a fair race.
You have backup and government funding.
I cut across traffic, nearly got hit by a black SUV, then slipped through the side entrance of my apartment building before the sirens faded somewhere farther downtown.
Fifth floor.
No elevator.
Because apparently poverty burns calories.
By the time I unlocked the apartment door, my hoodie smelled like rain, sweat, and decisions future-me was absolutely going to resent.
Marisol was already near the entrance putting on her coat.
She looked at me.
Looked at the clock.
Then sighed like she had personally predicted my downfall years ago.
“You’re late again.”
“I’m building connections.”
“You need better connections.”
Fair.
She walked back toward my mother’s room before leaving. Same routine every night. Check the blankets. Adjust the television volume. Whisper a prayer quietly under her breath like she was signing out of a shift spiritually and professionally at the same time.
Then she grabbed her purse.
“And stop coming home so late,” she said while pointing at me. “God is watching.”
Which felt unfair honestly.
Between the government, surveillance cameras, and apparently God, privacy was basically extinct.
Marisol shook her head and left.
Then the apartment got quiet.
Not peaceful quiet either.
Machine quiet.
I opened the fridge and grabbed one of the beers hidden behind the orange juice.
I was twenty.
Close enough I guess.
I walked down the hallway toward my mother’s room, bottle hanging loosely from my fingers while the television flickered softly against the walls.
Same as always.
Same blanket folded neatly over her legs.
Same eyes aimed vaguely toward the ceiling.
Same silence that had been sitting in this apartment since I was seven years old.
Thirteen years.
Long enough for tragedy to start feeling like furniture.
I sat down beside the bed and rested my arms against the chair.
“You would’ve loved Marisol tonight,” I said. “She told me God was watching me again.”
The television glow shifted softly across her face.
“I think between surveillance cameras and religion, privacy’s basically extinct.”
I looked down at the bottle in my hand.
“I had a job downtown.”
The words came casually now.
Routine.
“Fake maintenance uniform. Fake badge. Whole thing.”
I smiled slightly.
“They made my fake name David.”
I shook my head once.
“I don’t even look like a David.”
The apartment hummed quietly around us.
“You know what’s funny?” I continued. “The police department looked exactly how you’d expect.”
Bad lighting.
Burnt coffee.
Everybody looked exhausted in a government-funded kind of way.
“I got the files though.”
That part came out quieter.
“The client wanted archived records from some basement server. Didn’t say why.”
I shrugged slightly.
“I didn’t ask either. Questions usually lower profit margins.”
My eyes drifted toward the television before settling back on her.
“But I saw Dad’s name.”
For a second I just sat there looking at the floor.
“At first I thought it was somebody else,” I said quietly. “But it was him.”
The bottle turned slowly in my hand.
“You know nobody ever explained that situation properly?”
I laughed softly under my breath.
“Actually that’s not true. Everybody explained it. That was the problem.”
My grandmother said he trusted the wrong people.
My aunt swore he got set up.
One of my uncles kept saying:
“Your father talked too much.”
Which honestly could mean anything depending on where you grow up.
I leaned back in the chair.
“The drug charges never made sense to me though.”
Dad wasn’t smooth.
Didn’t hustle.
Didn’t know how to lie correctly.
My father was the kind of man who folded receipts neatly after buying batteries.
The kind of person who read instruction manuals voluntarily.
Not exactly criminal mastermind material.
“They said he died from health complications after detainment,” I said quietly.
I looked down at the beer bottle and lifted it slightly—
then stopped.
A tear slowly rolled down the side of my mother’s face.
Just one.
I stared at it without moving.
Because she’d done that before.
Rarely.
Randomly.
The doctors always called it involuntary.
But sitting there in the dark with my father’s name still glowing from the laptop in the other room—
for the first time in years—
that explanation suddenly didn’t feel good enough anymore.
I stayed sitting there for a while after that.
Beer still in my hand.
Television humming softly in the background.
My mother motionless again like the tear never happened at all.
The apartment suddenly felt unfamiliar.
Not different.
Just…
misplaced.
Like something inside it had quietly shifted while I wasn’t paying attention.
I looked toward the hallway where the laptop screen still glowed faintly from the kitchen table.
The files were still there waiting for me.
Which honestly irritated me a little.
Because up until tonight my life made sense in a very specific kind of dysfunctional way.
Not good sense.
Not healthy sense.
Just predictable.
Wake up.
Answer problems.
Make money.
Avoid police.
Ignore emotional damage.
Repeat.
Simple.
There’s comfort in survival when you stop expecting life to become meaningful.
I rubbed my thumb slowly against the side of the bottle.
The truth is, I hadn’t thought about my father seriously in years.
Not intentionally anyway.
People assume losing someone freezes them in your mind forever, but honestly memory gets practical after enough time passes.
Bills replace grief eventually.
Responsibilities replace questions.
And after a while the dead start feeling less like people and more like stories everybody tells differently.
That’s what happened to my father.
Depending on who spoke about him, he was:
naive,reckless,unlucky,too honest,or stupid enough to trust the wrong people.
Nobody ever sounded certain.
That’s what always bothered me.
Not the death.
The uncertainty.
Like everybody knew a different version of him and none of them matched completely.
I leaned forward slowly in the chair.
When I was younger, I used to think adults knew things.
Then I got older and realized most people just repeat whichever explanation hurts them the least.
My grandmother blamed the city.
My aunt blamed the police.
My uncles blamed my father himself.
My mother stopped blaming anything out loud eventually.
Then again…
my mother stopped talking entirely.
I looked toward her again instinctively.
Same television glow.
Same stillness.
But now my brain kept replaying the tear whether I wanted it to or not.
One tear.
That was enough to ruin the comfort of certainty.
Because if some part of her was still in there—
really in there—
then what else had I been wrong about?
The bottle tapped softly against the arm of the chair while I stared into the dark hallway.
The smart decision would’ve been closing the laptop and delivering the files tomorrow morning like nothing happened.
Get paid.
Move on.
Continue surviving.
That was the version of my life I understood.
But curiosity is a dangerous thing when you grow up around silence.
Eventually you start digging just to prove something was hidden in the first place.
I stood up slowly and walked back toward the kitchen table.
The laptop screen reflected faintly against the apartment windows while the case file sat unopened in front of me.
CASE STATUS:
CLOSED
Yeah.
Sure.
I sat down slowly in front of the laptop.
The apartment felt darker now for some reason.
Not physically.
Mentally.
Like opening the file would make something official.
The extraction drive blinked quietly beside the keyboard while the case folder sat in the center of the screen waiting for me to stop acting dramatic and click it already.
I stared at it another couple seconds anyway.
Then finally opened it.
Folders spilled across the desktop instantly.
PHOTOS
INTERVIEWS
EVIDENCE LOGS
INCIDENT REPORTS
SUPPLEMENTAL DOCUMENTATION
The kind of organization that makes terrible things look professional.
I clicked the incident report first.
OFFICER INVOLVED NARCOTICS INVESTIGATION
CASE STATUS: CLOSED
PRIMARY SUSPECTS: REDACTED
Then farther down:
PERSON OF INTEREST:
— my father’s name —
Seeing it typed out officially felt strange.
Like the system had touched him.
I leaned back slightly in the chair.
The report claimed my father was arrested during an active narcotics investigation tied to distribution routes moving through the city ports.
That alone sounded ridiculous.
My father barely understood smartphone updates.
I kept scrolling.
Interview logs.
Transfer forms.
Evidence references.
Nothing useful.
No revelations.
No hidden recordings.
No secret government files waiting dramatically in a folder somewhere.
Just paperwork.
Pages and pages of bureaucratic language written by people professionally trained to remove humanity from sentences.
INTERVIEW CONDUCTED
SUBJECT UNCOOPERATIVE
TRANSFER AUTHORIZED
NO FURTHER COMMENT
The same phrases repeated over and over until everything started sounding artificially clean.
I clicked through the evidence logs next.
Most of them were useless.
Receipts.
Transfer forms.
Parking citations.
Half-completed reports.
One attachment was literally just a scanned coffee-stained sticky note with no signature attached.
I stared at the screen quietly.
Thirteen years.
This was thirteen years of mystery.
“That’s it?” I muttered.
The apartment stayed silent around me.
I opened another folder.
More nothing.
Missing timestamps.
Redacted names.
References to reports that no longer existed.
Not enough information to understand anything.
Just enough information to feel intentionally incomplete.
That part bothered me more than if the files had been fully deleted.
Because deleted means destroyed.
This felt edited.
Like somebody wanted the case to survive technically while making sure nobody could actually learn from it.
I rubbed my face slowly.
My entire life people talked about my father like he died in the middle of something important.
But staring at the files now…
it looked smaller than that.
Messier.
Sadder.
Just another man processed through a system that misplaced human beings professionally.
I clicked into the final report.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
COMPLICATIONS FOLLOWING DETAINMENT
No elaboration.
No explanation.
Just a sentence sitting alone on government letterhead pretending that counted as closure.
I stared at it for a long time.
Then finally laughed quietly to myself.
Not because anything was funny.
Because suddenly I understood why people stop looking for answers.
The system doesn’t hide truth dramatically.
It buries you in paperwork until your grief gets tired first.
Then—
something slid softly beneath the apartment door.
I froze.
Not dramatically.
Instinctively.
The sound itself was small.
Paper against wood.
But at three in the morning every noise suddenly has intentions.
I walked slowly toward the door.
A folded piece of paper sat halfway beneath it.
Plain white.
No envelope.
I picked it up and unfolded it carefully.
Two words.
TRUST NO ONE
That was it.
No signature.
No explanation.
Just enough to make my stomach tighten.
I unlocked the apartment door quickly and stepped out into the hallway.
Empty.
Buzzing fluorescent lights.
Old building silence.
Nothing else.
I walked toward the stairwell fast enough for my socks to slip slightly against the floor.
Still nothing.
No footsteps.
No closing doors.
No elevator sounds.
The hallway stretched quietly in both directions like nobody had ever been there at all.
Which somehow felt worse.
I turned back toward the apartment—
and stopped.
The front door sat slightly open.
Not wide.
Just enough.
Every survival instinct I had woke up instantly.
I pushed the door open carefully.
The apartment looked untouched.
Same television glow.
Same humming refrigerator.
Same beer bottle sitting on the table.
But the laptop screen was black.
I walked toward it slowly.
Then faster.
“No no no—”
I grabbed the mouse hard enough to almost knock the laptop sideways.
The folders were gone.
Every file.
Deleted.
Not hidden.
Not corrupted.
Gone.
Even the extraction drive had been wiped clean.
I stared at the empty desktop breathing harder now.
Because that didn’t make sense.
I was gone maybe thirty seconds.
A minute max.
Then I noticed it.
Sitting perfectly in the center of the kitchen table.
A yellow envelope.
Clean.
Unmarked.
Waiting.
The apartment suddenly felt very small around me.
I reached for it slowly.
Inside was a photocopied report and a flash drive taped to the back.
REPORTING OFFICER:
DETECTIVE MARCUS VALE
PARTNER:
— my father’s name —
I stared at the word:
PARTNER
for a long second.
Because nobody had ever told me my father worked with police.
Not once.
According to the report, Detective Vale and my father had been involved in independent follow-up investigations tied to narcotics seizures moving through the shipping ports years before my father’s arrest.
Which made absolutely no sense.
My father got nervous returning library books late.
Now apparently he was helping investigate organized trafficking?
I plugged the flash drive into the laptop.
Folders opened slowly across the screen.
Bank records.
Transfer logs.
Offshore accounts.
Millions of dollars moving quietly between names I didn’t recognize.
Then another folder.
PRIVATE MATERIAL
I clicked it.
Then immediately wished I hadn’t.
Messages.
Photos.
Recordings.
Enough evidence to ruin Detective Vale’s life several times over.
And judging by the timestamps, somebody had been collecting it carefully for years.
I leaned back slowly from the screen.
Because suddenly this didn’t feel like corruption anymore.
It felt curated.
Like somebody had built a private archive waiting for the right person to find it.
I stared at the list of names until they stopped feeling like people.
Just patterns.
Connections.
Silences.
Loose threads stitched together by years nobody wanted to revisit.
Detective Vale.
Port Authority contacts.
Case numbers.
Family members.
The cursor blinked patiently beneath the last name while rain tapped softly against the apartment windows.
I leaned back slowly and rubbed my eyes.
My body felt exhausted now.
Not normal tired.
Heavy.
Like my brain had burned through something it wasn’t supposed to use all at once.
The apartment stayed quiet around me.
My mother’s television still humming faintly down the hallway.
The beer sitting half-finished beside the laptop.
The yellow envelope still lying open on the table like a wound.
Then suddenly—
my father used to tie my cleats too tight.
Why is that the thing I remember?
Not the funeral.
Not the arrest.
Not the hospital.
The cleats.
I could see it perfectly.
Sunlight against the field.
Grass stains on my socks.
My father kneeling in front of me pulling the laces tighter while I complained dramatically like children do when they still think discomfort is injustice.
“Good,” he said once.
“That means they won’t come off when you run.”
I remember believing he knew everything.
That’s the part ruining me right now.
Because the man in those memories doesn’t fit the files.
Doesn’t fit the reports.
Doesn’t fit the erased records sitting open on my laptop like somebody tried to remove the truth carefully instead of completely.
The apartment felt wrong now.
Not dangerous.
Distorted.
The hallway looked longer somehow.
The shadows stretched strangely across the walls.
Even the television static from my mother’s room sounded distant.
Like I was hearing it through water.
My thoughts started moving too fast.
Not thinking anymore.
Colliding.
I stood up too quickly from the kitchen chair.
My heartbeat slammed violently against my ribs—
then disappeared.
Not slowed.
Gone.
And somehow that terrified me more than panic.
Because suddenly there was no fear.
No movement.
No emotion.
Just this horrible empty stillness.
Like the world had stopped for one second too long.
I looked down at my hands.
They didn’t feel connected to me anymore.
I don’t understand what’s happening.
The thought echoed strangely inside my head.
Not like a sentence.
Like something cracking.
Why does it feel like my life is collapsing right now?
It has to be karma.
Right?
That would at least make sense.
You spend years lying.
Stealing.
Manipulating systems.
Eventually something breaks back.
Fine.
Fair.
But have I really done things that bad?
The question repeated itself strangely.
And suddenly none of my usual answers sounded stable anymore.
Survival.
Hustling.
Adaptation.
The words felt weak now.
Like excuses worn down from overuse.
I remembered second grade suddenly.
Career day.
Kids saying astronauts.
Athletes.
Rappers.
And me smiling proudly saying:
“I wanna be like my dad.”
That memory hit so hard my vision blurred instantly.
Because who was he?
Who the hell was my father really?
A criminal?
A witness?
A victim?
A liar?
And if I don’t know who he was—
then who exactly have I been becoming?
The apartment tilted sideways for a second.
Or maybe I did.
I grabbed the counter instinctively but couldn’t feel it properly.
My breathing sounded wrong now.
Too far away.
Then the memories started coming faster.
My mother checking locks repeatedly at night.
My uncle lowering his voice whenever I entered rooms.
My grandmother praying over windows.
Not grieving.
Waiting.
The thought twisted violently through my chest.
No.
No no no—
Everything suddenly went silent.
Not quiet.
Silent.
Complete.
The refrigerator disappeared.
The television disappeared.
Even the rain outside vanished.
And for one impossible second—
I saw myself.
Standing in the kitchen.
Motionless.
My body leaned slightly against the counter while my eyes stared blankly toward the floor.
The beer bottle still hanging loosely from my fingers.
My stomach dropped so violently I thought I was going to faint.
No.
No no no—
I tried to move but nothing felt real anymore.
The apartment looked wrong now.
Too dark.
Too deep.
Like reality itself had shifted slightly out of place.
My chest tightened violently.
I couldn’t breathe correctly.
Couldn’t think correctly.
And underneath all of it—
one thought kept repeating louder and louder:
TRUST NO ONE
My family.
Marisol.
The police.
The files.
My own memories.
I could feel something inside me unraveling.
Not emotionally.
Structurally.
Then suddenly—
my mother screamed my name.
“NICO!”
The sound ripped through me violently.
My body snapped backward instantly.
Breath exploded painfully back into my lungs.
The apartment crashed back into existence all at once—
television static,
refrigerator humming,
rain against the windows,
the cold counter beneath my hand.
I stumbled hard against the kitchen table gasping for air before running toward my mother’s room.
“Mom?!”
My heartbeat pounded violently inside my skull while I nearly slammed into the hallway wall.
I pushed the bedroom door open hard enough for it to hit the stopper.
Dark room.
Blue television light.
Motionless body.
Same as always.
My mother hadn’t moved.
Hadn’t spoken.
Hadn’t screamed.
Nothing.
I stood there frozen in the doorway trying to catch my breath while the television flickered softly across her face.
And somehow—
that scared me even more.
I backed out of the room slowly and shut the door halfway behind me.
Not fully.
I don’t know why.
The apartment felt smaller now.
Like the walls had moved slightly closer while I wasn’t paying attention.
I walked back toward the kitchen and stared at the laptop again.
Detective Marcus Vale.
The name sat there casually like it hadn’t just ruined my entire nervous system.
Think.
That was the first thought that felt stable again.
Not panic.
Not memory.
Not whatever the hell just happened to me.
Think.
If somebody slipped that envelope under my door, then somebody already knew I was looking.
Which meant somebody else was looking too.
That changed everything.
Because now this wasn’t about finding information anymore.
It was about finding information without becoming visible.
I stared at Vale’s name again.
What’s the worst thing somebody could do to hurt me?
The answer came immediately.
My mother.
Not me.
Never me.
That realization settled coldly into my chest.
I could survive almost anything happening to me personally.
Arrest.
Violence.
Debt.
Being hunted.
Fine.
Whatever.
But my mother?
One disconnected machine.
One missed medication.
One accident.
That was enough.
That’s how people like Vale survive.
Not because they’re smarter.
Because they understand leverage.
I opened a blank document slowly and started typing names.
Detective Vale.
Port Authority contacts.
Family members.
Dates.
Patterns.
Then suddenly I remembered tomorrow.
Or technically today now.
My grandmother’s birthday.
Everybody would be there.
My aunt.
My uncles.
Cousins.
People I hadn’t seen in months.
The whole family always gathered for her birthday no matter what was happening.
That’s how my grandmother measured love.
Attendance.
The realization settled slowly into my chest.
An opportunity.
Not to accuse anyone.
That would be stupid.
But to watch.
To listen.
To finally stop hearing my family as relatives and start hearing them as people.
That thought made me uncomfortable immediately.
Because part of me still didn’t want to believe any of this touched them.
I wanted one clean explanation.
One villain.
One answer.
But families don’t work like that.
Families bury things unevenly.
One person forgets.
One person lies.
One person stays quiet long enough for silence to become tradition.
I rested my head against my hand while my thoughts started moving slower now.
More distant.
I replayed conversations differently.
My grandmother changing the subject whenever my father came up.
My uncle always asking too quickly if I was “staying out of trouble.”
Marisol praying every night beside my mother’s bed.
The detective.
The locks.
The whispers.
The note.
TRUST NO ONE
I looked down at the blinking cursor one last time.
Then typed my grandmother’s name beneath everybody else’s.
Not because I suspected her.
Because suddenly I didn’t know what suspicion even meant anymore.
My eyes started burning from exhaustion.
The words on the screen blurred slightly together while the rain continued tapping softly against the windows.
I told myself I was just resting for a second.
Just long enough to think clearly again.
But my body had already made the decision before my mind caught up.
My head lowered slowly against my folded arms beside the laptop.
The last thing I remember seeing before sleep finally pulled me under was the list of names glowing against the screen.
And somewhere underneath all of them—
my father’s.
