Harper Langley’s note: The Secrets & Shadows series gives each heroine the space to speak in her own voice. Ava Reynolds is the third. She wanted to start from before Navarro.
Ethan used to argue with me about justice. Not tactics or strategy or what the law actually said — he’d argue about whether the concept itself was coherent. Whether justice was something that existed in the world or something we invented to make loss bearable.
He was nineteen. He had strong opinions. I was twelve, and I mostly argued back to stay up past bedtime.
He died believing it existed. That’s the version I carried into law school.
I want to be honest about what that belief costs, because I think it’s the thing I spent the most time not examining. I became a prosecutor because of Ethan. Because he died for something larger than himself, and the only way I could make sense of that was to be someone who fought for something larger than herself too. The logic was clean, at twelve. It got messier every year I spent watching men like Victor Navarro walk out of courtrooms while witnesses disappeared and evidence evaporated.
Losing the Navarro case broke something in me. Not because I made mistakes — I’m a good enough prosecutor to know the difference between losing because you erred and losing because the system was already arranged against you. I made the right arguments. I presented the evidence correctly. I told twelve people about the suffering he’d caused with the kind of clarity that should have been enough.
It wasn’t enough. It’s sometimes not enough. And sitting in that courtroom watching him adjust his tie while people who’d risked their lives to testify were left unprotected — I didn’t just feel like I’d failed. I felt like Ethan might have been wrong.
Here’s what I couldn’t say out loud to anyone at the time: I was afraid I’d become the thing I was supposed to be fighting.
Not corrupt. Not bought. Something more insidious — someone who put winning above everything else, who measured the worth of her work by the conviction rate, who had started confusing justice with success in a way that couldn’t distinguish between the two.
When Navarro’s men came after me, my first instinct wasn’t fear. It was a kind of dark vindication. The threat level is the confirmation. I’d learned that phrase from Claire Donovan — the journalist in Silent Watcher who’d covered a story about contaminated water at a military base — and I’d made it a professional principle. If powerful people are threatening you, you’re close to something real.
That’s true. It’s also a way of making danger feel like virtue. It’s a way of not asking whether what you’re doing to stay on the story is worth what it costs the people around you.
I asked myself that question honestly, once, in the middle of the week Navarro was hunting us. What if my need to win, to prove myself, to honor his memory, is turning me into someone who puts justice ahead of human life? I didn’t have a clean answer.
What I knew was this: Rachel was in danger because of me. She was in danger because I’d made choices that drew Navarro’s attention toward everyone I cared about, and I’d made those choices partly for Ethan’s memory and partly because the Navarro investigation was the biggest thing I’d ever worked on and I couldn’t make myself walk away from it.
That’s not purely noble. I know what that looks like on someone else’s profile.
Luke spent ten years treating me like something to be kept safe. I spent a lot of the first half of this nightmare furious about it — furious at the assumption that I needed managing, furious at the withheld information, furious at the way he’d positioned himself as the person who decided what I could handle.
I was right to be furious. I’m still right about that.
But somewhere in the second week, I started to recognize what my own version of it looked like. I’d been managing Luke’s guilt the same way he’d been managing my safety. I’d been deciding what he could handle — specifically, that he couldn’t handle hearing that Ethan’s death wasn’t his fault, that the mission had been set up, that he’d been surviving in a false story for a decade — because giving him that truth would require me to relinquish the grief-shaped Ethan I’d been preserving and face the more complicated one.
We were both protecting each other from things that would have helped us.
I went back for him in the warehouse. That’s the decision people seem to want to understand — the analyst, the prosecutor, the person with no special operations training, running into an active firefight to drag out an injured man.
I didn’t go back because I’d forgiven him. I hadn’t, not fully. I went back because watching him go down, watching the blood spread across his vest, I realized that all the anger and hurt and justified grievance I was carrying was less important than the fact that he was going to die if I didn’t move.
Love and trust are not the same thing. Claire Bennett figured that out in Fractured Cover. I figured it out on a pier in the middle of a firefight with people shooting at both of us.
What I owe Ethan isn’t a perfect conviction record or a career spent in service of abstract justice. What I owe him is the willingness to keep fighting — for the truth about what happened to him, for the people in my life who are still alive, for the version of justice that requires more courage than a clean trial.
He’d argue with me about this, probably. He had opinions.
I’d argue back. Some things don’t change.
Broken Oath is Book 3 of the Secrets & Shadows series. Available now on Amazon.