Chương 13
Lydia laughed through a breath.
“There.”
Helen glanced at me.
“You fed anyone in here?”
“No.”
“Of course not.”
She disappeared and returned ten minutes later carrying three dinner plates from the reception.
The sea bass was cold.
I ate it anyway.
Lydia ate two bites of potato and half a dinner roll.
Dana had gone outside to call her office.
Tessa sat at the end of the table reading documents while eating asparagus with her fingers because Helen had forgotten forks.
No one commented.
For a while, we were simply four women in expensive clothes eating cold wedding food in a breakfast room while strangers dismantled the celebration outside.
It was the first quiet moment of the day that did not feel like waiting for an explosion.
Then Lydia said, “I signed things because I wanted Marcus to succeed.”
I put down my fork.
Helen looked at me and shook her head slightly.
Do not fix it.
I understood.
Lydia continued.
“I wanted one thing in my life that wasn’t built by Mom.”
“That seems reasonable,” Helen said.
“It didn’t feel reasonable.”
Lydia tore the dinner roll into small pieces.
“It felt necessary.”
I said nothing.
“When people met me, they knew who she was.”
Her eyes stayed on the bread.
“School, jobs, parties, everything.”
I started to say that I had never interfered with her jobs.
Then I remembered who had introduced her to the executive who hired her first.
I kept quiet.
“Marcus didn’t care at first.”
She smiled faintly.
“Or he was good at pretending.”
Helen said, “Those can look identical for a while.”
Lydia nodded.
“He asked me what I wanted.”
“And?”
“I didn’t know.”
That word again.
But now it sounded almost ordinary.
“So he gave me something to want.”
“His company,” I said.
“Our future.”
She looked at the ring on the counter.
“I thought helping him meant I was building something.”
“You were,” Helen said.
Lydia looked at her.
“It just may not have been what you thought.”
My phone rang.
Julia.
I answered.
“What now?”
“We found the consulting payments.”
Lydia froze.
“What consulting payments?”
I put Julia on speaker.
Julia said, “Three payments totaling four hundred twenty thousand dollars were issued to a company called LGT Strategic Advisory.”
Lydia frowned.
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Tessa?”
Tessa was already searching through the papers.
Julia continued.
“The company was formed eight months ago.”
“By whom?”
“Registered agent service.”
“That tells us nothing.”
“We requested the underlying banking information from the institution through counsel.”
“Can they give it to you?”
“Not casually.”
“Then how did you find the payments?”
“Company accounting records.”
Lydia leaned toward the phone.
“Who owns LGT?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“What does LGT stand for?”
Julia paused.
“That’s what caught my attention.”
I looked at Lydia.
Her full name was Lydia Grace Vale before the wedding.
Lydia Grace Thorne now.
LGT.
She saw it at the same moment I did.
“No.”
Julia said, “I’m not saying it’s yours.”
“It looks like mine.”
“Yes.”
“I never opened a company.”
“I believe you.”
Lydia stood.
“Then somebody did.”
Tessa said, “We need the formation documents.”
“I’m working on it,” Julia replied.
My phone buzzed with an incoming email.
Julia said, “Open what I just sent.”
I did.
It was a scanned vendor onboarding form for LGT Strategic Advisory.
The tax identification field was partially redacted.
The mailing address was not.
I knew it immediately.
So did Lydia.
“That’s Grandma’s old apartment,” she whispered.
My mother had died four years earlier.
The apartment had been sold eighteen months after her death.
No one in our family had used that address since.
At the bottom of the form was a handwritten approval.
Not Lydia’s.
Not mine.
Peter Niles.
Lydia sat down again.
Julia said, “Peter didn’t just know something.”
I stared at his signature.
“No.”
“He approved the payments.”
Lydia stared at the signature as though Peter had written it across her skin.
“He told me to preserve messages because he was protecting himself.”
Julia’s voice came through the speaker.
“That is one possible interpretation.”
“One possible?”
“Do not turn suspicion into fact before we have records.”
Lydia pushed the plate away.
“I’m getting really tired of facts being slower than lies.”
No one had an answer for that.
Tessa copied the onboarding form into Lydia’s counsel file while Dana returned from the terrace.
Dana read it twice before sitting down.
“Peter’s signature proves he approved the vendor setup.”
Lydia said, “Which means he knew.”
“It proves he approved this form.”
Dana tapped the page.
“It does not yet prove he knew the company was fraudulent.”
“Why would anyone use my grandmother’s old address?”
“That is a very good question.”
I looked at Julia’s name glowing on my phone.
“Can we find where the money went after LGT received it?”
“We’re working on it.”
“How long?”
“Longer than you want.”
I disliked the answer because it was probably the only truthful one.
The reception ended around nine.
Not ceremonially.
It simply thinned.
Cars rolled down the drive one after another, headlights moving through the hedges, while staff stacked chairs and guests carried away stories they would reshape before breakfast.
Helen handled departures.
I stayed inside with Lydia.
At nine twenty-three, Detective Shaw called.
Marcus had contacted police through an attorney.
He was alive.
He was in Manhattan.
He had agreed to be interviewed the next morning.
Lydia sat down when she heard that.
She did not ask whether he was coming back.
I noticed.
Shaw also confirmed that Adrian Kessler had retained counsel and denied threatening anyone.
The van, according to his attorney, had been borrowed because Marcus wanted to avoid photographers and guests.
The explanation was stupid enough to be plausible.
The threatening phone number had not yet been attributed to anyone.
Peter remained at the hospital while his hand was treated.
No arrests had been made.
No dramatic justice arrived before dessert.
Instead, we got paperwork.
May you like
Preservation demands.
Bank subpoenas that would require court process.
