I go home that night and sit on the kitchen floor.
Not because I'm upset, exactly. More because it's where I go when something needs thinking through without the chair making it feel too comfortable.
Sera Valk's seven pages. Eleven months for the evidence kit. Harlow's two sentences. Three years of follow-up requests. A legal aid office filing on her behalf. All of it going into the same building I go to every day.
The legal aid office. I had looked it up in passing, its funding listed in a public record. A Wayne Foundation community legal services grant. Wayne money in the infrastructure of the things that almost worked. The city's old money in the foundations of good intentions that went nowhere.
I'd been in this building for five years. I'd thought of myself as someone who understood the gap between what the institution was supposed to be and what it was. I'd thought that understanding was a form of protection.
Sera Valk had walked into that building nine years ago with seven pages of careful block letters.
I sit with that for a long time.
The doorway in the East End, two months ago. A woman's hand. Half a second. Old grief, settled and structural, filed as baseline Gotham grief and closed.
I'd been wrong about what the grief meant. I'd been wrong because I made an assumption: that grief without rawness was grief without urgency. That something settled was something finished.
I was wrong before. I was wrong in ways that cost me something, and I learned from those and moved on and called it growth. This is different. This is a misread that cost time, during which Warren Luc was beaten half to death in his kitchen.
I don't know if anything would have changed if I'd flagged Dara in October. Probably nothing. Her file was clean, her story was consistent, there was nothing to put in a report. Even if I'd said something it would have gone nowhere.
But I'd had something and I hadn't said it.
I think about the registry. About the federal provision on the name change filing, available to registered metahumans seeking identity protection from harm. I think about what it means that the forms exist and I've been walking past them for five years. Not for protection. For accountability too.
I don't have a resolution for that. I file it the way Renee files things she isn't ready for.
I get up, turn the radiator on, go to bed.
The next morning Renee is at her desk with the Dara Osman file and the nine-year-old complaint and a third document I haven't seen.
She'd pulled who lived at the address nine years ago, who was on any utility account. The lease was in Sera Valk's name. But also: "I pulled the same-period records for one more thing. The alley adjacent to the address. City maintenance log. Six months ago, the alley's lighting was upgraded. Private donation to the city's infrastructure fund. Anonymous."
She says it without emphasis.
"The Narrows doesn't get anonymous infrastructure donations," I say.
"No," she says. "It doesn't."
We look at each other.
Neither of us has the framework for that yet. We both write it down.
Then Renee says: "I also pulled the photograph."
She turns her laptop toward me.
A local news item from eight months ago. A neighborhood watch meeting. A city councilman shaking hands with a local business owner.
The business owner is Joel Marrs.
His name is in the caption. His face is in the photograph.
"She could have seen this," Renee says. "It circulated. Neighborhood newsletter, social media."
"Eight months ago," I say. "She applied for the job in Gotham six months ago."
We look at each other.
"She saw his face," I say. "And she came back."
Renee turns the laptop back. She looks at the photograph for a long moment. Joel Marrs smiling in the background of someone else's moment, unaware that a photograph had ended whatever quiet he had left.
"We need to find out what happened nine years ago before we move on Osman," she says. "We need to know what we're walking into."
"Agreed."
"And we need Luc to wake up."
Outside the window Gotham is going gray with early morning. The rain stopped overnight and the streets are wet and reflective.
"He'll wake up," I say.