She called him immediately. He answered on the first ring. When she told him he went very quiet for a moment and then said, “How did you do this?”
She said she had written a letter. He said, “You sat in that big house and wrote a letter for me.”
She said yes. He said nothing for a few seconds. Then he said, “Roselene, I want you to know something.”
He said, “Whatever you have been doing in that house, whatever choices you have made there, I believe they have been the right ones.”
She stood in the kitchen holding the phone and felt something settle quietly inside her.
Then the second wave of trouble came from a direction nobody had anticipated at all.
Uh, a young journalist named Schlerer had been covering the Petra story closely and was digging deeper than most of her colleagues were bothering to go.
She found old contract archives and discovered that years before the current scandal, Oay Construction had won a large government tender for road infrastructure in the southern districts.
At the time, a few voices had questioned the decision. She found one of those voices and began making calls.
His name was Abara, a retired city planner who had left the planning office early under circumstances that were not clearly explained in the public record.
He gave Shorer three long conversations full of implications and strong feelings and very few documents.
He said the tender had not been awarded purely on merit. He said influence had been used.
He could not prove any of it specifically. Ashorer wrote the article carefully, attributing everything to Abara and noting the paperwork had appeared clean, but she published it.
The article appeared on a Wednesday in a midsized news outlet. By Thursday, it was on three larger platforms.
By Thursday evening, it was on radio. The timing was perfectly terrible. The accounts were still partially frozen.
A partner’s withdrawal letter was sitting on Derek’s desk. The Eastern District project was still paused, and now an old contract was being questioned by a man whose own history nobody was yet examining.
Two international firms in early talks with Oay Construction quietly ended those conversations the same week.
Nadia came home from abroad without calling ahead. She walked into the house and found her father eating alone at the long dining table and sat across from him.
I She did not ask about her mother. She said, “Tell me everything.” He did.
It took over an hour. She listened as seriously as she had always listened to everything in her life without interrupting, without visible emotion.
When he finished, she asked, “What do you need right now?” He put his fork down and could not answer her immediately.
Nadia was not a passive person. The next morning, she was awake before Derek, and she spent 4 hours at the kitchen table with her laptop, reading every article written about the case from the beginning.
She made notes. She identified factual errors. She drafted a document listing the claims in each article and what the actual documented truth was beside each claim.
She brought it to Roel when he came to the house that afternoon. Roel read through it carefully.
He said it was more organized than most legal memos he had received from trained professionals.
One afternoon, a journalist managed to get past the gate by telling the gate man she was a food delivery driver.
