Chương 7
He also watched his mother slap our daughter and chose embarrassment over her pain.
Human beings were inconvenient that way.
Priya pressed her lips together.
“I owed him.”
Arthur spoke gently.
“Owed him what?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
“That’s usually where trouble starts.”
She nodded.
“I kept telling myself the accounting stuff was temporary.”
“What accounting stuff?”
I asked.
“Moving expenses between projects.”
“Was that illegal?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it wrong?”
She looked at me.
“Yes.”
That answer mattered more.
“I told myself if the company recovered, we’d fix it.”
“Who is we?”
“Mark.”
“Who else knew?”
“Our controller knew pieces of it.”
“Name?”
“Daniel Cho.”
Arthur wrote it down.
“Did Daniel approve the Northline payments?”
“Some.”
“Did he question them?”
“All the time.”
“What happened?”
“Mark started bypassing him.”
Arthur stopped writing.
“How?”
“Direct authorization.”
“So Mark personally approved Northline payments.”
“Yes.”
I leaned back.
“What is Northline?”
Priya shook her head.
“I genuinely don’t know.”
“Did you search the company?”
“Once.”
“And?”
“Registered in Delaware.”
“That tells us almost nothing,” Arthur said.
“There was a mailing address in Wilmington and no real website.”
“Banking information?”
“In the accounting system.”
Arthur looked at her.
“Do not access it now.”
“I don’t have access now.”
“Good.”
She looked irritated.
“I’m not planning to hack my former employer.”
“I’m making sure nobody later claims I encouraged you.”
Priya looked at me.
“Does he always talk like this?”
“Yes.”
Arthur ignored us.
My phone rang again.
This time it was Mark.
The screen lit the table between us.
Arthur looked at it.
“Your choice.”
I stared at Mark’s name.
For the first time since last night, I answered.
“Hello.”
His breath came fast through the speaker.
“Where are you?”
“Safe.”
“Where are my daughters?”
“With me.”
“I asked where.”
“They’re safe.”
“Clara, stop doing this.”
“What am I doing?”
“You know exactly what.”
His voice dropped.
“I need you to come home.”
Priya closed her eyes.
Arthur leaned back without making a sound.
“Why?”
“Because we need to talk before this gets worse.”
“It already got worse.”
“Mom is a wreck.”
I nearly laughed.
“How’s Emma?”
There was a pause.
A long enough pause that he understood what he had just revealed about himself.
“She’s fine, right?”
“No.”
“Clara.”
“Her cheek is bruised.”
“Mom didn’t mean to hit her that hard.”
I looked at Priya.
She stared at the floor.
“So there was a correct amount of hard?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s exactly what you said.”
He breathed out sharply.
“This is why I can’t talk to you when you get like this.”
I felt an old reflex rising.
The desire to calm my voice.
To reassure him.
To make the conversation safe enough for him to continue.
I let the silence sit instead.
Mark filled it.
“Vance called me.”
“Okay.”
“He’s freezing Harbor Point.”
“Okay.”
“Stop saying okay.”
For some reason, that almost made me smile.
“You seemed to like it last night.”
“Do you understand what this could do to the firm?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t.”
“I understand more than I did yesterday.”
Another silence.
Then his tone changed.
Softer.
Dangerously familiar.
“Clara, listen to me.”
I closed my eyes.
“We’ve been married twelve years.”
“I know.”
“You know me.”
I looked toward the stairs.
“I thought I did.”
“I made a mistake.”
“Which one?”
He said nothing.
“The part where your mother hit Emma?”
“Of course.”
“The part where you agreed with her?”
“I panicked.”
“The part where you told your clients I was unstable?”
His breathing changed.
“Who told you that?”
“The part where someone forged my signature?”
The silence on the line became absolute.
Arthur’s eyes snapped to mine.
Priya stopped moving.
Mark finally spoke.
“What are you talking about?”
It was too late.
Not because of the words.
Because of the pause before them.
I opened my eyes.
“The Harbor Point guarantee.”
“Clara, that isn’t what you think.”
I felt the last soft part of the morning disappear.
“What is it, then?”
“It’s a standard authorization.”
“With my forged signature.”
“It wasn’t forged.”
“Did I sign it?”
He hesitated again.
“We had authority under the marital financial consent documents.”
Arthur silently shook his head.
“No, you didn’t.”
“You don’t understand the structure.”
“Then explain it.”
“I can’t do this over the phone.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s complicated.”
There was that sentence again.
I looked at Arthur.
He almost smiled without humor.
“Mark, where did the one hundred eighty thousand dollars from Vance go?”
His voice sharpened.
“Who the hell have you been talking to?”
I said nothing.
“Clara?”
Nothing.
“You need to stop.”
There it was.
Not an explanation.
An instruction.
He continued.
“You are messing with things you don’t understand, and if you destroy this company, people will lose their jobs.”
Priya’s face went pale.
“Is that what you’re worried about?”
“I’m worried about all of us.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you transfer forty-eight thousand dollars out of our checking account this morning?”
The line went dead quiet again.
When Mark spoke, the softness had vanished.
“That money was mine.”
“Half of it wasn’t.”
“I earned it.”
“We both own that account.”
“I built this life.”
The words came out before he could edit them.
My eyes moved toward the ceiling, toward the room where our daughters were hiding from the consequences of his version of family.
“You built it?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
I did.
More clearly than ever.
“Where did the money go?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“It came from our joint account.”
“I needed liquidity.”
“For what?”
He lowered his voice.
“Come home.”
“No.”
“Then meet me somewhere.”
“No.”
“Clara.”
“No.”
The word felt different from okay.
There was no ambiguity in it.
No room for translation.
Mark breathed hard into the phone.
Then he said something that made Arthur reach immediately for his pen.
“If you drag lawyers into this, you’re going to regret it.”
I looked at Arthur.
May you like
“Is that a threat?”
Mark said nothing.
