Sign the Papers Mr. Langford novel Chapter 382

That only made Joey panic more.

At three that afternoon, the trio arrived at the old registered address for Brightstone Consulting.

It was a dilapidated office building jammed between a wholesale market and a shady auto repair shop. The ground floor was littered with chaotic neon signs—phone repair kiosks, shady accounting firms, cram schools, and massage parlors all fighting for space. The elevator groaned as it hit the lobby, its doors scraping open with a grating screech.

Phoebe looked up at the floor directory.

"Eighth floor."

Joey clutched his laptop bag against his chest. "This place does not look like the headquarters for a high-end medical data consulting firm."

"A shell company doesn't need to look the part," Phoebe shot back.

Wren remained silent.

Staring at the yellowed fire evacuation map on the wall, a faint sense of familiarity prickled at the back of her mind.

It wasn't that she had been here before.

It was that she had seen places exactly like this when she was a child.

There was a time when Quentin Whitaker was constantly late picking her up from school. Vivian used to tell the driver to take her home first, but one day, Wren had waited by the school gates until it was pitch black outside. When Quentin finally arrived, he reeked of cheap cigarettes and the damp, musty smell of a derelict building.

He had been highly agitated that day, snapping into his phone, 'Leave the files there. Do not bring them to the house.'

She hadn't understood it back then.

But now, every passing memory seemed to bleed out from the cracks in the peeling walls.

The elevator dinged at the eighth floor.

The old office at the end of the hall had been replaced by an acting school. Posters plastered the glass doors, and the muffled voices of students running lines drifted out into the corridor.

The young receptionist looked utterly bewildered when they asked about a company from over a decade ago.

"We've only been renting this space for three years."

"Would the landlord or building management know about the previous tenants?" Phoebe asked.

"Management is on the second floor, but they cycle through staff pretty fast," the girl replied thoughtfully. "I think the eighth floor used to be storage space, and then some small startups. You could try asking the accounting firm next door; they've been here forever."

The door to the neighboring accounting firm was half-open.

Inside, an older woman with reading glasses sat behind a desk piled high with ledgers. When they mentioned Brightstone Consulting, she initially drew a blank. But when Phoebe showed her the old corporate registration screenshot, she leaned in for a closer look.

"Oh, this place." The woman pushed her glasses up her nose. "I think I vaguely remember them."

Wren immediately pressed, "Did they actually operate out of this office?"

The woman chuckled dryly. "Operate? I barely saw a soul. The door was locked year-round, and occasionally someone would show up just to grab the mail. Back then, half the building was full of businesses like that—registered here on paper, but physically a ghost town."

Wren's mind instantly flashed to Vivian Vance in The Heritage Photo.

She heard her own voice, faint and trembling.

"Did she ever come back?"

The woman shook her head. "I don't remember. The company broke their lease not long after that. Later on, someone else came looking for them, claiming there were files left behind."

"Who?"

"A little girl." The woman furrowed her brow, trying to recall. "Young, maybe a teenager. Looked like she'd been crying her eyes out. She kept asking if anyone had seen a blue file folder."

Phoebe's head snapped up.

Wren's breathing hitched.

A teenager.

Crying.

A blue file folder.

That person could only have been her.

But she had absolutely zero recollection of ever setting foot in this building.