Chương 4
Celeste stood alone beside the ruined lamp.
For the first time since I had known her, she looked old.
David lowered his voice.
“The board packet is in my car.”
“What did you find?”
“Enough to call an emergency session.”
“How much?”
He glanced toward the kitchen.
“Preliminary review puts unexplained vendor transfers at four point eight million over twenty-six months.”
I felt Emily turn toward us.
David saw her reaction.
“Mrs. Westbrook, I’m not asking you anything right now.”
She shook her head.
“You should.”
“Not without counsel if you’re worried about your own exposure.”
“I didn’t take anything.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
She looked at me.
I knew that look.
She was about to protect someone.
“Emily.”
She swallowed.
“I copied the files because Adrian told me the payments were bonuses.”
David’s expression tightened.
“What kind of bonuses?”
“He said executive retention payments.”
“Paid to vendors?”
“I asked that too.”
“And?”
“He told me accounting structured them that way.”
David sat in the chair opposite her.
“Did you access those files through his account?”
“No.”
“My account.”
Adrian’s voice came from the kitchen doorway.
The sergeant stood behind him.
Emily’s face changed.
Adrian continued.
“She stole my credentials.”
“I knew your password.”
“You had no authorization.”
“You gave it to me when you asked me to print your travel reimbursement forms.”
“That doesn’t mean you get to rifle through confidential records.”
David looked at him.
“Mr. Westbrook, I strongly recommend you stop discussing company systems.”
Adrian laughed.
“You work for me.”
“No.”
David crossed one leg over the other.
“I work for the Harrington Family Trust.”
Adrian looked at me.
Something in his expression finally shifted from anger to fear.
“You’re Harrington?”
“My husband was.”
Celeste stared at me.
I watched memory move across her face.
Twenty-two years earlier, when Westbrook Industries had nearly collapsed under debt, my husband, Thomas Harrington, had put capital into the company through a trust designed to keep his name out of daily operations.
He had no interest in running factories.
He liked restoring old radios, hated golf, and thought most board meetings could have been emails before people regularly said such things.
After his death, the voting authority passed to me.
I rarely used it.
That had apparently encouraged several people to forget it existed.
Celeste lowered herself into a chair.
“You were the rescue investor.”
“Yes.”
Adrian stared at me.
“You control the trust?”
“I chair its ethics committee and hold its voting proxy.”
His face hardened.
“So this is revenge.”
“No.”
“For Emily.”
“This was under review before I knew you had hurt her.”
That landed harder than I expected.
He looked toward David.
David gave him nothing.
Adrian rubbed both hands over his face.
For a moment he looked less like a tyrant and more like a tired forty-year-old man who had just discovered the floor beneath him was not solid.
Then he turned toward Emily.
“You did this.”
She stared at him.
“You did this to me.”
The officer beside her shifted slightly.
Adrian stepped forward.
The sergeant caught his arm.
“That’s enough.”
“I’m talking to my wife.”
“She doesn’t look like she wants to talk to you.”
“You don’t know anything about our marriage.”
Emily spoke before anyone else could.
“He’s right.”
Everyone looked at her.
She wiped beneath one eye with the heel of her hand.
“You don’t.”
Adrian relaxed slightly, misreading her.
Emily continued.
“None of you do.”
She looked at Claire, then Nolan, then Celeste.
“I spent two years making excuses for him.”
Celeste opened her mouth.
Emily raised her good hand.
“No.”
Her voice cracked.
She waited.
Then she tried again.
“No, you’ve had enough turns.”
Celeste actually closed her mouth.
Emily looked at me last.
“I made excuses to you too.”
My throat tightened.
She looked away.
“The arm wasn’t the first time.”
I heard the refrigerator humming again.
Somewhere on the dining table, a phone began vibrating against wood.
No one reached for it.
The sergeant asked, “Mrs. Westbrook, would you be willing to speak with us privately?”
Emily looked toward Adrian.
He was staring at her with disbelief.
Not guilt.
Not yet.
Disbelief that she had broken the arrangement.
She stood.
“Yes.”
Adrian shook his head.
“Emily, if you walk out that door with them, don’t come back.”
She stopped.
For one terrible second, I thought he had reached her again.
Then Emily looked around the room where she had served dinner with a broken arm.
She looked at the wineglass holding her ruined phone.
She looked at the overturned chair and the lamp shattered beside the wall.
Finally, she looked at her husband.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
Emily walked toward the front door without looking back.
The patrol officer followed, keeping enough distance that she did not feel escorted like a suspect.
I started after her.
“Margaret.”
David’s voice stopped me.
He held out his hand.
“The drive.”
I looked through the open doorway at Emily standing on the porch beneath the yellow light.
She was answering the sergeant’s questions while rubbing the thumb of her good hand against the seam of her jeans.
“I’m going with her.”
“You should.”
“Then why are you holding out your hand?”
“Because that evidence should not spend the night in your purse.”
He had a point, and I disliked him slightly for making it while my daughter was outside describing how her husband had broken her arm.
I removed the flash drive.
David took a small evidence envelope from his briefcase.
“You carry those around on Sundays?”
“I was told to bring the board documents.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“No.”
He slipped the drive inside without touching the connector.
“I carry them on weekdays too.”
Nolan gave a nervous laugh from behind us.
Nobody joined him.
David wrote the date, time, location, and my name across the envelope.
Then he signed beneath it and handed me the pen.
I signed too.
May you like
Adrian watched us from the kitchen doorway.
“You’re treating that like evidence.”
