She knew the sound of her heels were as rattling to the male power grid in Washington as a reporter who’d uncovered pork projects hidden in a transportation bill. Here she comes, they thought, her Jimmy Choos making more noise than their Allen Edmonds. It always happened as she strode into a meeting, the eyes of the mostly male faces either going straight to her chest, or disapprovingly to her blond hair. It’s all real, fellas, she often wanted to declare, plopping down her briefcase.

Kate was so used to the constant evaluation, she could smell it on men like a bad cologne. It was strong in the ones around her as they moved down the hallway and into the elevator. Her white suit stood out sharply against their black pants and coats. Her frequent companions in these last, horrible days. Her own funeral procession.

As the elevator descended, she waited for a quick stop. After all, there shouldn’t be many floors beneath a warehouse. Yet they continued to an uncomfortable depth.

“We’re almost there, Senator.”

“It’s fine,” she lied.

It wasn’t fine, none of it was fine. The fact that she was even back here, sinking beneath the SSA’s headquarters, was troubling enough. But it had been her own doing; she’d insisted on knowing more, especially given that her mother and nephew’s files were missing information. There were references to absent personal letters, something about notations from her great-grandmother Freda. But she had seen little else other than the video of the questioning of her mother as a little girl when she’d been found in Mexico.

Mexico. My God.

William’s file was picked over, obviously missing other documentation. “I don’t want some of it,” she’d demanded. “I want it all. On all of them.”

As she’d awaited what was promised to be the entirety of the SSA’s files into her mother and William, she’d been emailed several documents on a boy named Ryan Hardwood. On the flight back from Memphis, she’d read them in their entirety. Upon landing, she summoned her driver and dialed the number for director Mark Wolve.

“Where is this boy?” she’d said before he could even say hello.

The SSA director was somewhere down south, leading the search for her nephew and the girl. But he’d said he’d have someone escort her when she arrived.