Three cars again, same order they always came in now — Gilbert first, Julian second, Nate last because he refused to leave the bar until the Saturday crowd was handed off to his staff. Saturday had belonged to the Brotherhood since Lexx was born, an arrangement nobody had voted on and everybody kept showing up for anyway.
Audrey climbed out of Gilbert’s car with a tote bag over one shoulder and a bottle of wine in the other hand, already talking before her door had fully shut. Kyle spilled out of Julian’s back seat at a dead run toward the front steps, shouting something about a movie he’d been promised, and Julian followed at a pace that suggested he’d given up trying to slow him down years ago.
"Sam couldn’t make it," Audrey said, catching up to Arianne at the door. "Something with the studio, apparently. She sent a very long apology text and an even longer list of reasons attached to it."
"She’ll survive missing one dinner."
"Try telling her that."
Inside, Leo and Lily had already claimed the good couch, blankets arranged into the exact configuration movie night required, a bowl of popcorn between them that Kyle made a beeline for the second he cleared the doorway. Aunt Estella appeared from the kitchen with a second bowl and a third blanket, already narrating the evening’s rules — one movie, no fighting over the remote, bed by nine regardless of how it ends.
"I’ve got them," Audrey said, dropping her bag on the side table and settling onto the arm of the couch like she’d done this a hundred times. "Go do whatever it is you all do in there."
"We talk," Gilbert said.
"You talk like it’s a covert operation." Audrey was already reaching for the remote, fending off three competing opinions about which movie won tonight. "Go."
Franz had Lexx on his arm when Arianne found him in the hallway, the baby fussing in the specific pitch that meant he had decided, unilaterally, that sleep was not happening tonight. He’d been fighting his nap all afternoon and losing every round until dinner, and now he was wide awake and furious about it, one fist working into Franz’s shirt collar like he intended to renegotiate the terms.
"He won’t go down," Franz said. "I’ve tried twice."
"Bring him with you, then."
"That obvious?"
"You’ve been holding him for twenty minutes without noticing you’re doing it." She reached over and smoothed a hand along Lexx’s back, and his fussing eased half a degree, enough to make the trip to the sitting room without a full protest.
Nate had already claimed the armchair by the window when they came in, sleeves shoved up past his elbows the way he wore them behind the bar, a stack of folders squared on his knee. Gilbert took the couch across from him, and Julian dropped into the last open seat with the particular heaviness of a man who’d spent the drive over bracing for this conversation.
Franz sat with Lexx against his chest, one hand cupped over the baby’s back, and Arianne took the spot beside him.
"How long," Franz asked, before anyone had said anything else.
"Longer than I promised." Gilbert set a stack of five folders on the coffee table, squared to match Nate’s. "I told you days, not weeks, back at the forum. I was wrong. The surface work went fast. What slowed him down was everything sealed underneath it — childhood records, adoption files, the kind of thing that takes a court order and a favor to get anywhere near. He had to verify each man’s early years well enough to compare them against what we already know about Howard before any of this meant anything at all."
"Three months is a long time to sit on five names," Julian said.
"Three months is nothing, compared to how long Howard’s had to build whatever cover he’s using now." Gilbert didn’t look up from the folders as he squared them a second time. "I’d rather be slow and right than fast and wrong about which of these five men we point at."
"Which one," Nate said, "is Howard Brennan."
Gilbert didn’t answer right away. He opened the middle folder instead and slid it across the table, turning it so it faced the room.
"This one has a hole in it." He tapped the photograph clipped to the inside cover, a man in his mid-forties with an unremarkable face, the kind that photographed the same in every picture regardless of the year printed underneath it. "Officially, he had a chronic illness through most of his childhood. Housebound. Never enrolled in school, never on a team photo, never at a birthday party anyone else remembers attending. Nobody outside a small circle laid eyes on him before he was fifteen. Then he shows up in a school photo at fifteen, healthy, no trace of whatever supposedly kept him inside for a decade."
"Illness doesn’t have to leave a trace," Julian said. "Kids get sick. That’s not evidence of anything."
"It’s not the illness that bothers me. It’s the absence of everything around it. No hospital records match the story. No doctor’s name recurs anywhere in what we could find. A story like that usually leaves paperwork behind, even a bad one. This left nothing, which tells me it isn’t a story. It’s a gap somebody built to stand in for one."
Nate reached into his own folder, pulled a second sheet free, and set it beside Gilbert’s photograph without being asked. "I found something that fits into that gap. This same man appears on an old employee roster at Summers Corporation, a short stint, less than a year, during Gabriel Summers’s time running the company."
Arianne’s eyes hadn’t moved off the photograph since Gilbert set it down. She said nothing, and nobody rushed her.
"That’s the same window Ysabella wrote about," Franz said, his voice pitched low enough that Lexx stirred once against his chest before settling. "A young man showing up at the house. Gabriel let him in."
"It fits," Nate said. "And it doesn’t end there. Several years after he left Summers Corp, this same name resurfaces as an investor in Conway Capital. Small position at first. It grew." He tapped the folder once. "The name on file is the same one who shook your hand at the forum. Edmund Cole."
Julian sat forward, elbows on his knees. "That’s not a coincidence anymore."
"I didn’t say it was."
Gilbert reached for the photograph and turned it toward Arianne directly, though she hadn’t asked him to. She looked at it the same way she’d looked at the man across the forum floor, nothing about his face telling her anything she hadn’t already worked out from six feet away in a room full of strangers.
"Say it out loud," Nate said. "What you’re thinking."
"I’m thinking he shook my hand and told me a firm I’d never heard of, and I let him walk away because the odds were low." Arianne’s voice didn’t waver. "I’m thinking the odds weren’t as low as I told myself they were."
"We should double-check the timeline," Franz said. "All of it, laid out where we can see it at once. Not folders. Something we can actually look at side by side."
Julian was already on his feet.