Chapter 3 - A CHOICE THAT BELONGED TO CALEB
Caleb read the message three times without moving. I wanted to reach for his phone, call the police, invent a route that would put every problem in the hands of somebody with training. Instead I asked him what he wanted to do. That question mattered. Almost everyone in his life had treated decisions about him as decisions somebody else should make.
He signed: I want Nina safe. I don't want to give him another chance to trap me. We stood under the café awning, blocking the wind while customers hurried past. I suggested we step inside and make a careful record of the message before taking any action. Caleb agreed. He sent screenshots to his own email and to the attorney whose card he carried in his wallet. Her name was Rebecca Shaw, and although he had not hired her, he had been quietly collecting contact information for a month.
Rebecca answered his video call after several attempts. Caleb signed while I interpreted only when she asked for clarification. He wanted her to know about Nina, the threatening message, and the bank statements. Rebecca took him seriously, a small grace that seemed to surprise him. “This may be coercion,” she said. “It may also be somebody exploiting your fear. Either way, don't go to the property. I'm arranging for you to make a statement and preserve the evidence.”
An hour later Nina returned our call. She was shaken but unharmed. A man had approached her outside the café, claimed Dominic had sent him, and insisted she deliver a sealed envelope to a garage on the West Side. She refused and drove away before noticing that somebody had followed her for several blocks. Nina didn't know who had sent the message to Caleb. Her account relieved one fear and raised another: somebody knew where he was and was using people close to him as leverage.
Caleb asked Nina to meet Rebecca at her office. He would join them in a separate car arranged by the attorney. I decided my part was finished. I was a waitress, not an investigator, and stepping back would not betray him. Before I left, however, Caleb touched my wrist lightly and signed: Can you come? Not because I cannot manage. Because you saw what he is like when others are watching. The distinction struck me. He wasn't asking me to speak for him. He was asking whether I would be a witness.
Rebecca's office occupied the fourth floor of a modest building with scratched wooden doors and a receptionist who immediately asked Caleb his communication preference. For a moment his expression softened again. A professional interpreter joined remotely, and I sat off to the side while Caleb told his story in his own language. My account was limited to what I had personally witnessed at Bellamy's: Dominic's ridicule, the order, the tense demand for translation, and the warning about the lake house.
Rebecca laid the documents in three piles. The first contained public material about the explosion. The second contained Caleb's bank records, whose authenticity and context she said would require verification. The third was his personal history: messages from his father, accounts of financial control, and communications restricting access to family employees. “We don't need to solve a homicide to establish boundaries,” she told him. “And we shouldn't let the suspicion of one crime erase the very real choices you can make today.”
Caleb signed that his trust payments came through a family office his father controlled. He owned his apartment on paper, but Dominic's staff handled the bills, transportation, and even many of his appointments. Rebecca began identifying which arrangements were legal obligations and which were merely habits nobody had dared question. She asked him for written authorization to request records and explained that any legal action would proceed only with his informed agreement.
Late that afternoon a woman called Rebecca's office and introduced herself as Iris Monroe, Helen's former housekeeper. She said she had given Caleb the photograph and the surviving letter. She would not discuss details over the telephone but was willing to meet if she could bring her own lawyer. Rebecca agreed and set a time. Iris added one thing before ending the call: “Caleb's mother was planning to leave. That's what the explosion interrupted.”
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I watched Caleb process those words. His mother had not simply died in a family tragedy, he realized. She may have been preparing a different life for herself and her son. This was information, not proof of murder, and Rebecca repeated that carefully. Yet it changed the question Caleb had been asking for fourteen years. Instead of wondering only how his mother died, he wanted to know what she had been trying to do while she lived.
We were leaving Rebecca's office when her receptionist brought a heavy envelope delivered by messenger. There was no letter, only a copy of Helen's death certificate and a photograph taken on the lake-house driveway the evening before the explosion. In the photograph, Helen stood beside a dark car. Dominic was nowhere in sight. On the back someone had written: ASK YOUR FATHER WHO DROVE HER THERE.
