The Option

She had an option. She understood this clearly, in the way she understood everything about this — with the precision of someone who had been through it before.

She could wait. She could build the record, document the violations, file the contempt motions, wait for the full hearing. This was the slow path. This was the patient path. This was what Aaron had been telling her to do for months.

Or she could act. She could go to the storage unit herself. She could find out what was in it and what Drake had been going there to find. She could use whatever she found.

She called Aaron.

"I want to go to the storage unit."

"Absolutely not." His voice was immediate, flat. "You go near that facility, you go anywhere near it, you tip him off that you are investigating. He already knows you are watching — the anonymous mail proves that. If he knows you are looking at the storage unit, he moves whatever is there. Or he makes it a confrontation."

"So what do I do?"

"You wait. You let the PI do the work. You build the record slowly and carefully and you do not give him anything to work with." He paused. "I know this is hard."

"It is hard."

"It will continue to be hard. That is what waiting is."

She hung up and sat at the kitchen table and looked at the evidence log and thought about patience, which was not a virtue she had ever had in great supply, and which she was learning, in the slow hard way that she was learning everything, to practice.