She was quiet for a moment. “Tell me what you need.”
That sentence almost broke me. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was simple. My own mother had heard that my apartment burned down and treated it like spilled coffee. Jasmine, who had known me only four years, sounded ready to drive across the city in her pajamas.
“I need clothes,” I said. “And I need you to check something.”
“Anything.”
“Did you tell anyone my flight was canceled?”
“No. Why?”
I sat on the bed’s edge, staring at the beige carpet. “Because whoever started the fire probably thought I was in San Diego.”
Jasmine went silent.
Then she said, “Claire, you need to hear something. Yesterday afternoon, while you were supposed to be gone, I saw your brother outside your building.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“What?”
“I was picking up lunch from that Thai place two blocks over. I saw Miles near the alley beside your apartment. I thought it was weird, but I figured maybe he was visiting you.”
“What time?”
“Around four-thirty.”
The fire had been reported at 9:18 p.m.
“Miles told me he was at work yesterday,” I said.
“Then he lied.”
I called Investigator Reyes immediately.
By noon, detectives were involved.
By three, they had gathered security footage from the Thai restaurant, a pawn shop across the street, and a traffic camera near my building. The footage showed Miles’s silver Ford Explorer circling my block twice. Then it showed him parking in the alley.
At 4:27 p.m., he got out carrying a grocery bag. His face was partly hidden by a baseball cap, but he had a limp from an old football injury. I had watched him use that limp for sympathy my entire life.
The camera did not show him entering my apartment. But it showed him leaving eleven minutes later without the grocery bag.
At 9:02 p.m., another camera caught him again.
This time, he wore a different jacket.
He entered through the rear stairwell.
At 9:11 p.m., he ran out.
At 9:18 p.m., the first 911 call was placed.
Detective Laura Kim showed me a still image from the footage in a small interview room at the Portland Police Bureau. She had short black hair, calm eyes, and the exhausted patience of someone who had heard every possible lie.
“Is this your brother?” she asked.
I looked at the screen.
“Yes.”
“Are you willing to provide a formal statement about the family conflict?”
“Yes.”
My voice did not shake that time.
The next day, police executed a search warrant at Miles’s house in Beaverton. They found my spare key in his garage, hanging from a hook beside paint cans and fishing rods. Not the burned duplicate from the scene—the original.
They also found a receipt from a hardware store dated six days before the fire. One key duplication. One red plastic gas can. One pair of black work gloves.
Miles claimed it was all a misunderstanding.
Then detectives found the group chat.
