“I told you,” I whispered.
She smiled through tears.
“I know.”
We postponed the honeymoon.
The seven-day cruise out of Charleston to Nassau and Grand Cayman was moved to October. Janet called the travel agent. I called my supervisor and requested personal leave. Nobody asked too many questions because weddings make people polite, and polite people are easier to keep at a distance.
On Monday morning, Janet and I went to see Karen Sims.
Karen was not law enforcement. She was a building-liability attorney in South End who had spent fourteen years handling injury claims and safety failures before opening her own practice. She had close-cropped hair, reading glasses she wore on a chain, and an office that looked like a library had been asked to prepare for cross-examination. Janet had met with her once the previous year, then stopped returning calls when the case seemed to stall.
Karen did not scold her.
She simply opened a drawer and pulled out a file thicker than I expected.
“I wondered if you’d come back,” she said to Janet.
Janet’s hand tightened around mine.
“I wasn’t ready.”
Karen nodded as if readiness had never been a requirement for truth.
Then she looked at me.
“And you are?”
“Her husband.”
Karen’s eyes moved from Janet’s wedding band to mine. Something softened by one degree.
“Congratulations,” she said. “Now let’s talk about Harrow Residential.”
The file told a story I recognized immediately.
A building door that had been reported faulty by twelve residents over five months.
An elevator camera listed as “intermittent” on an internal maintenance spreadsheet.
A service ticket opened eleven days before Janet’s incident and closed as resolved without a corresponding parts order.
A maintenance supervisor named Terry Booth, thirty-four, assigned to Janet’s building that week.
A property manager who wrote, in an email Karen had obtained from a former employee, “Do not escalate East 7th door issue until Q1 budget review.”
A company that had not misplaced its records so much as arranged them in a fog.
“This is not a clean case,” Karen said. “But it is not a dead one.”
Janet looked down at the file.
“I don’t want my whole life dragged through a conference room.”
“Then we will be careful,” Karen said. “You decide how much room this takes. But they have been relying on your silence. That is different from innocence.”
That sentence changed Janet’s posture.
Only slightly.
But I saw it.
We sent preservation letters. Karen requested archived access logs from Harrow’s third-party security vendor. The management company responded slowly, then defensively, then with the kind of polished irritation that usually means someone has found a problem in a drawer they hoped stayed closed.
Phil helped me organize a timeline, not as a legal actor but as a friend who knew spreadsheets better than any human should. We built a chronology from Janet’s emails, maintenance tickets, weather reports, pharmacy receipts, medical visits, and the building newsletter that cheerfully reminded tenants to renew leases while ignoring the broken front door.
Janet watched from the kitchen table one evening as I lined up printed pages.