Chương 9
“Now?”
“Yes, now.”
“You’re yelling at me about security credentials and you’re worried I said damn?”
“My daughters can hear you.”
There was a pause.
“Sorry, girls.”
Sophie said, “It’s okay.”
Claire turned.
“It is not.”
Sophie shrugged.
“Mrs. DeLuca says worse.”
Claire stared at her.
Grace nodded.
“Mostly at the Bears.”
Marcus coughed into his fist.
Alexander looked toward the ceiling.
Claire shut her eyes for two seconds.
When she opened them, some of the rage had broken apart.
It was still there, but now it had to share space with motherhood.
“Michael, revoke every credential Daniel has that touches anything outside the company.”
“I can do that.”
“Now.”
“I’ll call IT.”
“No.”
Claire looked at Nathan.
“Can you walk him through it?”
Nathan nodded.
“I can tell him what to ask for and what to preserve.”
Claire put Michael off speaker and handed the phone to Nathan.
“Talk to him.”
Nathan took it.
“Hi, Michael.”
He listened.
“No, I’m not law enforcement.”
Another pause.
“No, that isn’t necessarily reassuring, but we’ll work with it.”
Marcus crossed the office and closed the door.
Claire watched Nathan move toward the conference table.
“He really has a LinkedIn?”
Marcus nodded.
“Painfully real.”
Alexander walked around his desk.
“Your brother made a mistake.”
Claire laughed once.
“That’s a diplomatic way to put it.”
“He may have made several.”
“That’s better.”
“He also told you the truth when cornered.”
She looked at him.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No.”
“Good.”
She folded her arms.
“Because it doesn’t.”
Alexander leaned against the edge of his desk.
“What would Mercer find in the archive that matters to the sale?”
Claire’s eyes shifted toward the children.
Emma noticed.
“You can tell us to leave.”
Claire looked at her daughter.
“I’m not sending you away.”
“I didn’t say away.”
Emma nodded toward the adjoining sitting room.
“There’s a TV.”
Lily brightened.
“Does it have cartoons?”
Alexander said, “Probably.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t watch cartoons at work.”
“That sounds boring.”
“It often is.”
Claire hesitated.
Emma stood.
“Come on.”
Sophie followed reluctantly.
Grace slid out of the chair.
Lily stayed where she was.
Claire pointed.
“You too.”
Lily looked at Alexander.
“Can I bring the pen?”
“It’s my favorite pen.”
She immediately put it down.
Alexander blinked.
He had expected negotiation.
Lily said, “That’s okay.”
Then she followed her sisters.
At the doorway, Emma turned back.
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“If Uncle Michael helped Mr. Mercer by accident, are you going to be mad forever?”
Claire’s answer did not come immediately.
“No.”
Emma nodded.
“Okay.”
Then she closed the sitting-room door.
Claire stared at it.
“She’s nine.”
Alexander said nothing.
“She asks questions like she’s forty.”
“She probably doesn’t have much choice.”
Claire looked at him sharply.
“That sounded judgmental.”
“It was not intended that way.”
“She has had a normal childhood.”
Alexander let the silence sit between them.
Claire’s shoulders rose.
Then fell.
“Mostly.”
Marcus moved toward the door.
“I’m going to find actual food.”
“You just ate.”
“That was cheese.”
Nina’s voice came faintly from the reception area.
“No, it wasn’t.”
Marcus pointed toward the door without opening it.
“Hostile workplace.”
He left.
Claire almost smiled.
Then she looked at Alexander.
“My husband died three years ago.”
“You said.”
“He handled a lot.”
She rubbed her thumb over the edge of her phone case.
“Not the company.”
Her eyes stayed on the phone.
“The girls.”
Alexander waited.
Claire continued.
“School forms, dentist appointments, birthday presents for classmates I had never heard of, finding the missing shoe five minutes before we had to leave.”
A quiet laugh escaped her.
“He was very good at finding shoes.”
Alexander thought of Ethan’s tie.
He did not mention it.
“After he died, Emma started helping.”
“She was six.”
“I know.”
“She shouldn’t have had to.”
“I know.”
Claire’s voice sharpened, not because he had accused her but because she had already accused herself.
“I know.”
Alexander looked toward the closed sitting-room door.
“Knowing usually doesn’t undo it.”
Claire studied him.
“No.”
Her anger softened into something more tired.
“No, it doesn’t.”
Nathan approached with the phone.
“Michael is revoking the credentials and preserving logs.”
Claire took the phone back.
“Did he argue?”
“A little.”
“About what?”
“Whether resetting Mercer’s access would interfere with corporate systems.”
She closed her eyes.
“Of course.”
Nathan continued.
“He’s also contacting the building management company to freeze their audit trail so nobody overwrites anything.”
Alexander nodded.
“Good.”
Nathan looked at Claire.
“There is another issue.”
Claire opened her eyes.
“What?”
“The administrator login that disabled your cameras originated from a device fingerprint associated with previous building access.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The account was not just used remotely from some unknown computer.”
Nathan turned the laptop toward her.
“The device had logged into the building system before.”
Claire stepped closer.
“When?”
Nathan scrolled.
“Four times over the last six months.”
“From where?”
“The system doesn’t give me physical location by itself.”
“Can you tell whose device?”
“Not from this.”
Alexander asked, “What does it give you?”
“Browser type, operating system, device token, session history.”
Nathan tapped the screen.
“And this.”
Claire leaned forward.
A series of dates appeared.
The oldest was almost six months earlier.
The newest was the previous night.
Claire read them.
Her face tightened at the third date.
Alexander noticed.
“What happened that day?”
She did not answer.
He looked at her.
“Claire.”
“That was my birthday.”
Nathan looked away from the screen.
Claire kept staring at the date.
“Daniel came to dinner.”
Alexander’s expression changed.
“At your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Invited?”
Claire hesitated.
“Technically.”
“That word is doing a lot of work.”
“My brother invited him.”
Alexander’s jaw tightened.
“Without asking you?”
“He said he thought I shouldn’t spend my birthday alone.”
Nathan closed the laptop halfway.
Claire shook her head.
“I wasn’t alone.”
Her voice became quieter.
“The girls were there.”
She looked toward the sitting room.
May you like
“My mother came down from Wisconsin.”
She rubbed at the bridge of her nose.
