Chương 12
But according to the device records, the phone did not belong to Charles.
I stared at her over my daughter’s dark head.
“Whose was it?”
Samantha looked back at the message.
Then she raised her eyes to mine.
“It was registered to Lucas.”
For a moment, I thought Samantha had misread the message.
“That makes no sense.”
She handed me the phone as though seeing the words myself might make them less impossible.
The device had been purchased under Lucas’s name eleven months earlier and billed to a personal credit card ending in numbers I recognized from our household statements.
My daughter made a thin protesting sound against my chest.
I looked down automatically.
Her eyes were squeezed shut, her mouth working angrily at the air.
Everything inside me divided into two lives.
In one, I had just become her mother.
In the other, the man who should have been standing beside me had apparently owned a secret phone he used to arrange clandestine meetings with my father.
“Maybe Dad had it,” I said.
Samantha did not answer.
“He could have taken it from Lucas.”
“Yes.”
“Or Lucas gave it to him.”
“Yes.”
“Or someone registered it in Lucas’s name.”
“Yes.”
I looked up at her.
“Stop agreeing with everything.”
“I’m trying not to invent facts.”
“That is extremely inconvenient right now.”
The neonatal nurse adjusted the blanket around my daughter.
“She needs to go over to the warmer for a few minutes.”
My arms tightened instinctively.
“Why?”
“Just routine assessment because she’s early.”
“She’s breathing.”
“She is.”
“Then why?”
The nurse’s voice stayed gentle.
“We want to make sure she keeps doing that well.”
I hated the sentence because it was reasonable.
I kissed the damp hair at my daughter’s temple and let them lift her away.
The absence of her weight was immediate.
My body had known her for eight months.
Apparently it objected to separation after six minutes.
Samantha watched the nurses move to the warmer.
“You should rest.”
“Read the rest of Lucas’s memorandum.”
“Victoria.”
“If you tell me to rest again, you’re fired.”
“You cannot fire me while actively threatening me into unpaid labor.”
“I can try.”
She sat down.
The next page contained something Lucas had called a communication protocol.
He had created the second phone himself.
Not for Charles.
For their meetings.
I stared at the sentence until the words stopped looking like English.
“He bought it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Samantha continued reading.
Lucas believed his company email, work phone, and possibly his home network were being monitored.
He did not know by whom.
“He thought somebody was spying on him?”
“He suspected internal access.”
“That sounds paranoid.”
“It does.”
“Was he?”
Samantha looked at me.
“I don’t know.”
I almost snapped back, then remembered all the things that had happened since breakfast.
Maybe paranoia was just suspicion before the receipts arrived.
Lucas had written that he gave Charles the number only after confronting him about North Harbor.
Their first meeting took place at a diner because Lucas did not want company security systems recording their conversation.
“What did Dad tell him?”
Samantha turned the page.
“He admitted knowing the North Harbor invoices were fraudulent.”
The breath left me.
“So he was stealing.”
“Keep listening.”
Charles claimed the invoices were created to move money off the company books temporarily.
“Temporarily where?”
“Into accounts controlled by Merritt.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No.”
Lucas had demanded one too.
According to the memorandum, Charles said Baldwin-Gallagher had been facing a liquidity crisis almost two years earlier after losing two large contracts and absorbing unexpected fuel costs.
The board had not been told how close the company came to violating loan covenants.
Charles arranged private financing through Alder Ridge to bridge the gap.
“Eleven million.”
“Yes.”
“He actually put that money into the company.”
“Most of it.”
“And then started fake invoices to pay the lender back?”
“That seems to be what he told Lucas.”
“Seems?”
“Lucas didn’t believe the full explanation.”
Neither did I.
The nursery nurse called from across the room.
“Mom, she’s doing great.”
It took me a second to understand she meant me.
Mom.
The word landed somewhere the financial figures could not reach.
I watched my daughter kick one tiny foot free of the blanket.
“What did Lucas think Dad was hiding?”
Samantha read further.
Charles insisted he had started the arrangement to save the company.
Then, after the immediate crisis passed, somebody began redirecting larger sums than necessary.
“At first Dad participated?”
“Yes.”
“And later someone took over?”
“That was his claim.”
“Who?”
“He refused to tell Lucas.”
“Why?”
Samantha’s eyes moved down the page.
“Because, according to Charles, exposing the person would destroy Victoria.”
I laughed softly.
“Apparently everybody has spent the last year protecting me from reality.”
Samantha did not smile.
“What?”
She turned the paper toward herself.
“Lucas underlined the next sentence.”
“What does it say?”
“Charles said, ‘You married into this problem.’”
The room became strangely quiet despite all the machinery.
I thought of my mother.
Not because the sentence logically pointed to her.
Because Charles always spoke about families as things people married into.
For years, he had described Lucas as someone who married into ours even after the company carried both their names.
“What did he mean?”
“Lucas didn’t know.”
“Did he ask?”
“Repeatedly.”
“And Dad refused?”
“Yes.”
I looked toward my daughter.
Her tiny chest rose and fell beneath a striped hospital blanket.
My mother had been dead seven months.
Pancreatic cancer had reduced a woman who once rearranged furniture by herself to somebody who needed help opening a water bottle.
During her final weeks, Charles had rarely left her room.
Whatever else he was, he had loved her.
Or had needed her.
Sometimes those looked similar from the outside.
“Could Mom have known?”
Samantha paused.
“About the company?”
“Yes.”
“I have no evidence of that.”
“Lucas said I married into the problem.”
“He recorded Charles saying it.”
“Same difference.”
May you like
“No, it isn’t.”
I sighed.
