The inquiry was handled in separate rooms. Same building, same morning, same questions asked by different people in the same careful institutional tone that ethics boards use when they want you to understand the gravity of the situation without technically threatening you.
I went first.
The board's representative was a woman named Claire Osei. Late fifties, reading glasses on a chain, the manner of someone who had sat across from a lot of lawyers in a lot of uncomfortable situations and had long since stopped being impressed by any of them. She had my file open in front of her and a legal pad and a pen she didn't use once.
She asked about the will. I explained it. She asked about the co-residency arrangement. I explained that too: the condition, the forfeit clause, the financial implications for both parties, the rules we'd established at the outset.
She asked if any case-related discussion had taken place on the property.
"No," I said.
"You're certain."
"I'm certain."
She looked at me over her reading glasses for a moment. Not skeptically, more like she was taking a measurement.
"Ms. Stone," she said. "You understand that this arrangement, regardless of intent, creates a perception problem for the integrity of the proceedings."
"I understand that."
"And you proceeded anyway."
"The alternative was forfeiting a significant inheritance under conditions I didn't choose and couldn't reasonably have anticipated." I held her gaze. "I managed the conflict responsibly. The case record will show that."
She wrote something on the legal pad. First time she'd used it.
"We'll be in touch," she said.
Patricia was waiting outside the inquiry room when I came out. She fell into step beside me without a word, which was how Patricia communicated that things were either fine or contained. She only spoke at length when they weren't.
"How was it?" she said when we reached the elevator.
"Fine."
"Claire Osei."
"Yes."
"She's fair," Patricia said. "She'll look at the case record. If it's clean she'll say so."
"It's clean."
The elevator opened. We got in.
"Aria." Patricia looked straight ahead at the closing doors. "The person who filed this. Do you know who it was?"
I thought about a name I'd been carrying for a week.
"I have a strong suspicion," I said.
"When you confirm it," she paused. "Come to me first. Before you do anything."
I looked at her.
"Please," she added. Which from Patricia meant she was more worried than she was showing.
"I will," I said.
I didn't go back to the office. I walked the long way, through the park two blocks from the courthouse, the late autumn version of it with most of the leaves down and the light coming through the bare branches in the particular way it does when there's nothing left to filter it. I needed to think without walls around me.
The inquiry had gone fine. I believed that. The case record was clean because the case was clean and Claire Osei looked like a woman who read records properly. What I couldn't stop thinking about was Dana.
Not the complaint itself. I'd processed that, filed it, moved past the initial shock of it. What I couldn't stop thinking about was the specific thing Patricia had said. Come to me first. Before you do anything. Which meant Patricia thought there was a version of this where I did something I shouldn't. Something driven by the part of me that didn't process betrayal cleanly.
She wasn't wrong to worry about that.
Dana and I had been friends for four years. Real friends, the kind built from shared lunches and late nights and the specific intimacy of two people surviving the same difficult workplace together. She knew things about me that I didn't tell people. She'd been inside my apartment, inside my confidence, inside the details of my life in a way that very few people were allowed to be.
And she'd used that access. Even if the intention was protection, even if she'd genuinely believed she was doing the right thing, she'd used it.
I sat on a bench in the park and watched two pigeons have a disagreement about something and thought about what I was going to say to her and how I was going to say it and whether I was going to be able to say it without the anger getting in the way of the truth. I didn't have an answer yet.
I got up and went back to the office. Lucas texted mid-afternoon. Not about the inquiry. Just: How did it go?
Three words, no question mark. His version of asking without pushing.
Fine, I wrote back. Yours?
Fine. Harlow is displeased.
I almost smiled. When isn't he?
A pause. Then: Fair point. Then: Aria.
I waited.
Whatever you decide to do about the person who filed it, don't do it angry.
I stared at that for a moment. He knew. Of course he knew. He'd been sitting on the same short list I had and had arrived at the same name and had apparently been thinking about what I was going to do about it with enough concern to say something.
I know, I wrote back.
Do you.
I put my phone face down on the desk. Picked it up.
Working on it, I wrote.
His response came back immediately, which was unusual for him. He was typically unhurried even by text.
I know. That's why I said it.
I put the phone down again and looked at the Meridian files and thought about the specific frustration of being known accurately by someone you were professionally obligated to keep at a distance. It was a very particular kind of frustrating.
I found the details that evening. Not Dana. I wasn't ready for that conversation yet and I'd promised Patricia anyway. The detail was in the complaint itself. I'd been reading it again, the fourth or fifth time, looking for anything I'd missed, and I found it at the bottom of the second page in the section describing the nature of the shared arrangement.
One line. Small. Easy to miss.
The arrangement includes shared use of a private study containing case-relevant documentation.
I read it twice. The study. Case-relevant documentation.
There was no case-relevant documentation in that study. The Meridian files lived at the office or on my laptop. Nothing I'd brought to the house had anything to do with the Whitfield case. I'd been rigorous about that, specifically because of the ethics boundary.
So whoever had written this line either didn't know what was actually in the study, which meant they were guessing, adding detail to make the complaint seem more substantial than it was, or they knew about Harmon's files. The encrypted drives. The twelve years of evidence sitting in that house.
And if they knew about those... I sat back.
If they knew about those files, the complaint wasn't just about the ethics violation. It was about getting us out of the house.
I picked up my phone. Called Lucas. He answered on the second ring.
"The complaint," I said. "Second page. Bottom. Read me the last line of the third paragraph."
I heard him moving, papers, the particular focused silence of him reading.
Then: "Aria."
"Yes."
"This isn't about the ethics inquiry."
"No," I said. "It's not."
A silence. Not the processing kind, the other kind, the one that meant he'd already followed the thought to where it went and didn't like where it landed.
"Someone knows about the house," he said. "What's in it."
"Someone connected to this case."
"Which means"
"Which means Harmon's files aren't as hidden as we thought." I looked at my desk. At the complaint face down where I'd put it that morning. "Lucas. We need to sweep the house."
Another silence.
"This weekend," he said.
"Before the weekend," I said. "Tomorrow."
He didn't argue.
"Tomorrow," he said. "I'll drive."