At the far end of the room, Nia was helping children build a model of the town with wooden blocks and blue paper strips. She had drawn high ground, roads, and the river. A little boy insisted on adding a toy bus to every road.
“Buses go where people are,” he explained.
Nia smiled. “That’s a pretty good design rule.”
Lena watched her daughter and felt the familiar ache of time passing. Nia was almost grown. Soon there would be a college far away, a dormitory, a life in which Lena could not simply walk upstairs to make sure she was safe.
Loretta came beside her.
“You think she got all this from you?”
“Some of it.”
“And some from me. Don’t forget that.”
“How could I?”
Her mother handed her a plate of food.
“Then eat. Everybody’s been taking care of somebody else all evening. You can let somebody take care of you for ten minutes.”
Lena accepted the plate. Around her, neighbors discussed repairs, argued about the mayor, and exchanged phone numbers for future storms. The work of accountability was continuing in hearing rooms and records offices, but another kind of rebuilding was happening here, without formal authority or a single person in charge.
A town could be damaged by decisions made behind closed doors.
It could also be repaired, a little at a time, by people who decided to open them.
Chapter Fourteen: A Hearing Without Applause
The investigation took eight months.
There were no arrests at dawn in front of cameras. Nobody from Grayline was marched out of a penthouse in handcuffs while reporters shouted questions. Most days were slower and less satisfying: document requests, sworn interviews, engineering reviews, arguments over contract language, and meetings in rooms where fluorescent lights hummed long after sunset.
Gabriel Sloane’s team examined the project records. Independent engineers reconstructed how the unapproved drainage arrangement had affected the west channel during the storm. They identified the limits of the available data, including the portion of the flooding attributable to extraordinary rainfall that would have occurred even with the original design. Their report did not pretend to know what it could not prove.
