Behind me, I heard footsteps. I turned, expecting nothing. It was Jareth. He stood 10 feet away, hands in his pockets, eyes lowered.
"You didn't take it," he said.
I knew what he meant. "No," I replied. "Not yet."
He nodded. "I didn't want it to come to this."
"It already has."
He looked up. "You still think we can stop her?"
"I don't need to stop her," I said. "I need to expose her."
He exhaled through his nose like that answer had satisfied him all at once. Then he said something I wasn't ready for: "She made me vote to fine a widow last year. Said the wind chime her husband left was audibly intrusive. That's when I should have left."
He turned and walked off without another word.
I looked back at the sign. Visual uniformity. It was never about harmony. It was always about control. And now I had enough to start cracking it open.
I didn't sleep that night. Not out of fear. Something colder: calculation. The kind of mental clarity that only comes when you've seen exactly how they've built the lie and exactly where to start pulling the threads.
By dawn, I had the records request response in my inbox—three PDFs, each one an official county-stamped file from last year's contractor transition.