Chương 7
“Maybe.”
“Email account could be gone.”
“Maybe.”
“Office files could be gone.”
“Then why are you arguing with me?”
Julian looked at her.
Nora hated the tremor in her own voice.
“Find out before you ask him.”
Thomas said, “She’s right.”
Julian frowned.
Thomas continued.
“Adrian knows we’re looking. If there’s anything left, confronting him gives him reason to remove it.”
Julian’s mouth tightened.
“You think he would?”
Thomas did not answer.
He did not need to.
Nora returned to school Monday.
That was Laura’s decision.
Nora objected.
Laura said grief did not exempt anyone from algebra forever.
The school counselor had arranged for Nora to use a quiet room if she became overwhelmed, which meant every teacher looked at her as though she might break.
She hated it.
Maya solved the problem by complaining about cafeteria pizza for twelve consecutive minutes.
By lunch, Nora was almost grateful enough to tell her.
She did not.
Nobody at school knew about Julian.
That felt strange.
The secret was now scientifically true and socially nonexistent.
She watched classmates argue about a volleyball signup sheet while thinking that a man whose name appeared on buildings was her father.
Maya threw a napkin at her.
“You’re doing the stare.”
“What stare?”
“The one where your body is here but your soul has filed paperwork somewhere else.”
Nora looked at her.
“That’s a very specific stare.”
“I’ve known you since you had bangs.”
“That was one year.”
“It was a difficult year.”
Nora smiled despite herself.
Her phone vibrated.
Thomas.
She declined the call.
He texted instead.
Need to speak with you and Laura tonight. Nothing urgent. We found something.
Nora stopped smiling.
The discovery came from an old storage vendor in New Jersey.
For years Vale family offices had used automatic tape backups before moving most systems to cloud storage. The company’s general counsel thought the relevant data had been destroyed.
A former IT administrator remembered otherwise.
Certain executive files had been preserved during litigation unrelated to Claire.
Thomas obtained access through the company’s current counsel.
Among Adrian’s archived folders was a document created thirteen years earlier.
Its filename was C_Bennett_final.doc.
The text matched the letter Julian remembered.
Thomas brought a printed copy to Laura’s apartment.
Nora read it.
Julian,
Please do not contact me again. The child I am carrying is not yours. Whatever existed between us ended before I understood what I wanted from my life. I am leaving New York and I need you to respect that.
Claire Bennett
Nora stared at the full signature.
There it was.
Claire Bennett.
Wrong.
But still not enough.
Thomas pointed toward the document metadata.
“The file was created under Adrian’s user account.”
“Can people fake that?”
“Yes.”
Nora looked at him.
“You always ruin the good part.”
“It’s my job.”
“Can you prove he wrote it?”
“Not by metadata alone.”
Julian sat across the room.
He had come quietly and had barely spoken.
Nora looked at him.
“Did this look exactly like the letter?”
“The wording does.”
“What about the paper?”
“Vale office stationery.”
“So Adrian printed it.”
“Probably.”
“And the signature?”
Julian’s jaw tightened.
“It looked like Claire’s.”
Thomas said, “We found another file.”
He placed a second sheet on the table.
It was a scanned signature page from a contractor agreement Claire had signed while working with a firm used by Vale Capital.
Her signature had been cropped into a small image.
C. Bennett.
The file sat in the same folder.
Created two days before the rejection letter.
Nora stopped breathing for a moment.
Julian stood and walked toward the window.
Laura whispered, “Jesus.”
Thomas said, “This is stronger.”
“Enough to do what?” Nora asked.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On what you want done.”
The question irritated her.
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
Thomas folded his hands.
“Because your mother is dead, the lie concerned you, and you are old enough to have a view.”
“I’m thirteen.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t fire him.”
“No.”
“I can’t put him in jail.”
“No.”
“Can he go to jail?”
Thomas was quiet.
“Forging private correspondence is serious. But age, statutes of limitation, the purpose of the forgery, whether money or property was obtained, and what other acts followed all matter. I’m not going to promise you a criminal case.”
Nora hated legal language less when Thomas used it because he seemed to use it to avoid lying.
“What can Julian do?”
Julian turned from the window.
“He can remove Adrian from every company position I control.”
Nora looked at him.
“You mean you.”
“Yes.”
“Then why haven’t you?”
Julian’s face tightened.
Thomas watched him carefully.
Julian sat again.
“Because I want to hear him explain it.”
“Why?”
“He’s my brother.”
The answer was so simple Nora had no argument ready.
That made her angrier.
“So?”
Julian looked at her.
“So I’ve known him forty-three years.”
“And my mom knew you what, six months?”
“Eight.”
“She got thirteen years taken from her.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
Laura said her name quietly.
Nora kept going.
“You got lied to and now you get to be sad because your brother did it. She had to raise me while people thought she was some woman who disappeared after getting pregnant by a rich guy.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
Julian stopped.
Nora stood.
She hated that everyone remained calm.
She wanted someone to behave badly enough that her own anger would look reasonable.
Instead Julian sat with both hands resting on his knees.
Finally he said, “What do you want me to say?”
“The truth.”
“I don’t know what the truth is yet.”
“You know Adrian made the letter.”
“I know a file was made under his account.”
Nora laughed once.
“You sound like Thomas.”
Thomas said, “I’m sorry.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“No.”
That nearly broke her anger.
She hated him for that too.
Nora picked up the photocopy.
“My mom thought you wrote this.”
May you like
Julian looked at it.
“She thought you told her to leave you alone.”
