When the driver stepped out, I recognized him immediately.
Councilman David Mercer.
The same guy whose face had been on campaign signs all over town for months talking about “family values” and small business jobs.
Amber looked straight at me through the front window and actually went pale.
Then she came outside so fast she almost tripped on the porch step.
Before I could even ask anything, she whispered, “Please don’t start acting scared of me too.”
The councilman stayed by the SUV pretending to check his phone like he didn’t know exactly why I was there.
Amber kept insisting it “wasn’t what I thought,” which honestly only made me feel worse because I still didn’t even know what to think yet.
Finally she admitted she’d been working for him privately for almost eight months. Not an office job. More like a fixer. Scheduling things that couldn’t go through assistants. Delivering cash envelopes. Setting up meetings nobody wanted connected to their real names.
That was why the second phone existed.
At first, she said, the money felt impossible to turn down. He paid her rent the first week. Covered her car note the month after that. Then slowly she got pulled deeper into everything because every favor came attached to another one.
The reason she looked terrified all the time wasn’t because she was hiding some glamorous secret life.
It was because she knew too much.
While we were standing there arguing quietly on the porch, Mercer finally walked over smiling like we were old friends. He actually stuck his hand out to me.
Then he said, “Amber’s been a real lifesaver lately. Your sister’s one of the loyal ones.”
I still remember how fast Amber looked down at the ground after he said that.
Like loyalty wasn’t a compliment anymore.
She quit two weeks later after Mercer started calling her nonstop when she didn’t answer one night.
For months after, she jumped every time an unfamiliar car slowed near her apartment.