''Day Two | 11:43 PM | February 12th, 2025''
'Wednesday. One day before the game.'
'One day before I make his life considerably worse.'
.
.
I don't keep diaries.
Let me be clear about that. I am not a man who writes things down in notebooks and processes his feelings onto paper. I have spent eleven years in military service. I have operated in conditions that would end most men. I do not journal.
And yet.
Here I am.
Call it documentation. Call it a record. Call it whatever makes it sound less like the thing it is — a private general with two years, a grudge the size of a small country, and a prisoner in cell 109 who somehow still has the audacity to 'complain' about five laps.
I'll start at the beginning. Since apparently I'm doing this.
---
Her name is Mara Crowe.
She's twenty-two years old. She has our mother's eyes and our father's stubbornness and she laughs too loudly in quiet rooms and she used to steal the last biscuit from the tin and blame the dog we didn't have.
She is also the reason I am sitting in a correctional facility on a Wednesday night writing in a notebook instead of sleeping.
Two years ago, Mara called me.
I was deployed. Somewhere I cannot name in a report I cannot share, doing things that don't exist on official record. My phone had been off for eleven days. When I turned it back on, I had forty-seven missed calls.
Thirty-one from Mara.
Sixteen from a number I didn't recognise.
I called Mara first. She didn't pick up. I called the unknown number.
It was a lawyer.
Not our lawyer. Someone else's lawyer, explaining to me, that my sister had been arrested, charged, and sentenced for a hit-and-run accident that had occurred three weeks prior. That she was already inside. That the case had moved fast — unusually fast — and that the evidence was, the lawyer said, 'compelling.'
I sat in a vehicle in a country I cannot name and I listened to this man tell me about my sister and I said nothing.
When he finished, I asked one question.
'Who was the other driver?'
He said he didn't have that information.
I found it anyway. It took me four days. Four days of pulling threads from the other side of the world — calling in favours, accessing things I wasn't supposed to access, following money through three shell companies and two lawyers and a very conveniently timed police report.
'Ruaan Calder.'
Twenty-six years old. Wealthy family. Clean record — suspiciously, immaculately clean. Engaged, recently, to a man named Dominic Frey whose financials had changed considerably in the three months following the accident.
I sat with that name for a long time.
Then I went back to work. Because I am a professional and I had a job.
But I remembered it.
I always remember.
.
.
What I didn't know — what nobody told me, because Mara didn't want me to know, because she has always tried to protect me from things she thinks will break me — was why she was on that road.
I found out eight months later.
Our mother had been sick for two years. Quietly, she did everything, without making a fuss, without asking for help, without telling her son who was eleven time zones away that her kidneys were failing.
Mara knew. Mara had known for a year. She had been tested, had matched, had spent months arranging the donation surgery quietly around her own life.
The day of the accident was the day of the pre-surgery consultation.
Mara was driving to the hospital to donate part of her kidney to keep our mother alive.
She never made it.
Our mother waited. Then she got worse. Then she got worse again. Mara, inside, couldn't do anything. I was trying to navigate a deployment and a legal system from the wrong side of the planet. We ran out of time.
Our mother died on a Tuesday.
Mara found out through a phone call from a nurse.
I found out three days later.
I requested emergency leave. I was denied. I completed my deployment. I came home to a funeral I had missed by two weeks and a sister who had lost twenty pounds inside and a grave that still looked too new.
I stood at that grave for a long time.
And I thought about Ruaan Calder, who had been eating desserts imported from Italy and planning a wedding while all of this was happening.
'This part I know for certain. He had a standing order from a bakery in Palermo. Cannoli, specifically. Forty-eight-hour delivery. I know his preferences better than he knows mine.'
---
Two years.
That's how long I spent after the deployment ended. Two years of building a file — not out of obsession, I want that on record, out of 'thoroughness.' Ruaan Calder is a man who has never faced a consequence he couldn't pay someone to remove. He is charming and careless and has spent his entire adult life treating other people as variables in his own comfort.
I wanted to know everything.
His allergies — dust, surprisingly, and one specific preservative in cheap processed food. His sleep patterns. His social connections. His financial dependencies. The fact that his father cut him off quietly but maintained the appearance of support for the family name. The fact that Dominic Frey had been feeding me information from the inside for fourteen months in exchange for protection of his own considerably complicated financial situation.
'Dominic did exactly what I needed him to do. I didn't even have to ask twice.'
I know that Ruaan trained at a private gym three times a week and has never run more than four kilometres at a stretch. I know that he was bluffing about lifting that weight today. I know that his legs were finished around lap seven and he completed ten through stubbornness alone.
That part I will admit I did not entirely predict.
It doesn't matter.
---
Blackmere is a large facility.
It is also, it turns out, quite small when you are sharing it with one specific person.
I watched him today. I watched him come back from the visitation block with his jaw set and his fists loose at his sides and with the particular stillness of a man who thinks he's the most dangerous thing in any room he walks into.
He is not the most dangerous thing in this room.
'He should note that.'
He doesn't know how much I know about him. He suspects something — I could see it in the way he looked at me after the training, the pieces assembling themselves behind those eyes. He's smart. Smarter than he pretends to be, which is the most dangerous kind.
It doesn't change anything.
Tomorrow is the Thursday game.
I have already arranged what needs to be arranged. Someone in cell 109 will do what needs to be done.
Tomorrow, Ruaan Calder is going to understand what it feels like to lose something when it matters.
It's a small thing.
Small.
But this is day two of seven hundred and thirty.
'I have time.'
'I have all the time in the world, Ru.'
---
'— H.L.C'
'H.L.C — and if anyone is reading this and thinking that middle initial stands for something interesting, it doesn't. It stands for nothing. It means nothing. Do not investigate it.'