Chương 5
“Did you serve the divorce petition?” Miriam asked.
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“That is not like you.”
“I know.”
“Do you still want to file?”
Rebecca looked toward the garage exit, where daylight formed a hard white rectangle.
Yesterday, the answer had been yes. That morning, while fastening the brass buttons of her uniform, the answer had been yes. In the elevator on the way to the boardroom, with Ivy asleep against her, the answer had felt like the only stable thing left in her life.
Now Julian’s ignorance complicated it, and she resented him for that too.
“He failed to find me,” she said.
Miriam did not argue.
“He believed I left him.”
“He was given evidence designed to make him believe that.”
“He wanted to believe some of it.”
“That may also be true.”
Rebecca shifted Ivy to the other side. “He knew his mother hated me.”
“Hate is a strong word.”
“Eleanor doesn’t use strong emotions. She outsources them.”
Miriam smiled faintly, then became serious again. “Not knowing about Ivy is different from having no responsibility. You can hold both ideas.”
“I don’t know what I’m holding.”
“You do not have to decide in a parking garage.”
Rebecca looked at the divorce papers in Miriam’s briefcase.
“I came here to end my marriage.”
“You came here to expose interference and protect your child.”
“I can do both.”
“Yes.”
“But I didn’t.”
“No.”
Ivy’s hand opened and closed against Rebecca’s skin. The baby fed with noisy concentration, unaware that attorneys were preserving servers and executives were calculating liability because she existed.
Rebecca touched the soft curl above her ear.
“Drive,” she said.
“To the lodging facility?”
“To the clinic first.”
Miriam started the car.
Behind them, the executive elevator opened. Julian stepped into the garage without a coat, scanning the rows of vehicles.
He saw them just as Miriam pulled toward the exit.
Rebecca turned her face forward.
She did not ask Miriam to stop.
Julian remained in the garage until the sedan disappeared into traffic.
His phone began vibrating almost immediately. Dana. The board chair. The company’s outside counsel. His head of communications. A reporter whose number he did not recognize. His mother called twice.
He answered none of them.
The garage smelled faintly of exhaust and wet concrete. He stood in the lane until a driver in a black SUV tapped the horn, then moved aside.
On level forty-two, his life had separated into before and after with no transition between them. Before, Rebecca was his estranged wife, unreachable by choice, perhaps crueler than he had wanted to admit. After, she was the mother of his child, and every unanswered message became evidence of someone else’s hand.
But beneath the shock, another question had begun to form.
How had he accepted the silence so completely?
He returned to the executive floor by the service elevator. The receptionist stood when he emerged.
“Mr. Prescott, Ms. Rusk asked that you go directly to Conference Room B.”
“Where is Vanessa?”
“With counsel.”
“My mother?”
“Her driver took her home.”
“Did she surrender her personal phone?”
The receptionist hesitated. “No, sir.”
Of course not.
In Conference Room B, Dana had assembled three laptops, two external drives, and six people from legal, compliance, and information security. No one had touched the pastries left from an earlier meeting.
Dana motioned to an empty chair. “Julian, we need to establish an independent committee immediately.”
He remained standing. “Do it.”
“You cannot participate in the investigation.”
“I’m chief executive.”
“You are also a potential witness, a family member of the accused, and the subject of communications that may have been manipulated.”
“I want access to my email archive.”
“You will have access through counsel after collection.”
“That is my email.”
“It is company property.”
The answer irritated him because he had used it himself on employees.
Martin Shaw sat at the far end of the table, pale and perspiring. “We also have a disclosure problem.”
“We have a crime problem,” Julian said.
“We don’t yet know that a crime occurred.”
Dana looked at Martin. “We know enough to preserve and investigate. We do not characterize beyond the evidence.”
Julian pulled out a chair. His hands were unsteady, so he placed them beneath the table.
“Tell me what you know.”
The head of information security, Priya Nand, rotated a laptop toward him. “At 2:13 this morning, someone using Mrs. Prescott’s credentials accessed archived vendor invoices and attempted to delete three payment records.”
“My mother?”
“We cannot confirm the user. The login originated from her residential network.”
“Can deleted invoices be recovered?”
“Yes.”
“What were they?”
“Payments to a consulting firm called North Lake Patient Advocacy.”
Julian had never heard of it.
Priya continued. “The firm was incorporated fourteen months ago. Its registered agent is a corporate service company. We are tracing ownership.”
“The maternity clinic access?”
“A Summit IP address assigned to the executive guest network was used to access a credential-stuffing tool targeting the clinic portal. We do not yet know who operated the device.”
Julian looked at Dana. “Credential stuffing?”
“Trying stolen or reused passwords against an account,” she said. “Captain Hale’s portal password may have been obtained elsewhere or guessed. Access logs alone do not prove who did it.”
“My mother was photographed outside the clinic the day Ivy was born.”
“That establishes presence, not the digital intrusion.”
He hated the measured language. It made catastrophe sound administrative.
“What about Vanessa?”
Priya answered. “Her company laptop contains calendar changes affecting your travel and communications. We have also found a rule in your executive inbox that automatically forwarded messages containing Captain Hale’s name to a private archive folder.”
Julian stared at the screen.
“Could I have seen the folder?”
“Yes.”
“Would it appear in my normal inbox?”
“No.”
“Who created the rule?”
“We are reviewing logs.”
“Could Vanessa?”
“She had delegated access.”
May you like
He looked down at his hands.
For years Vanessa had managed the clutter around his life: flights, calls, gifts, condolence notes, board dinners, dry cleaning, medication refills when he traveled, birthday flowers for relatives he rarely saw. She knew which reporters he would answer, which hospital chiefs could interrupt meetings, which charities mattered to Eleanor. After Rebecca’s deployment, Vanessa had begun leaving food on his desk when he worked late. Once, when he fell asleep on the office sofa, she placed his coat over him.
