Chương 6
She stepped back.
“Marcus?”
“At the hospital. Bianca asked staff not to release information to Eleanor.”
“Did she ask for me?”
“No.”
The disappointment embarrassed Camille.
Dana noticed anyway. “You are not obligated to make the woman who slept with your husband feel less alone.”
“I know.”
“You also aren’t forbidden.”
“I know that too.”
Dana opened a folder. “The sheriff wants a formal interview tomorrow. I’ll attend. The family office has called three times asking you to join an emergency board meeting. You will not. Roger sent a preservation notice covering all personal devices, accounts, documents, and communications related to Sterling Mountain Holdings and the foundation.”
“So Grant was telling the truth.”
“Grant told you something useful. That is not the same as telling the truth.”
Dana turned the laptop toward her. The corporate structure filled the screen in boxes and arrows: Sterling Mountain Holdings, three resort subsidiaries, the Sterling Family Foundation, North Basin Development, several limited partnerships, and a charitable housing fund created after wildfires displaced workers in the western part of the state.
“Your father’s ledger may concern transfers among these entities. The North Basin project failed eighteen months ago. Public filings show a one-hundred-twenty-million-dollar impairment.”
Camille set down her coffee.
“How much was transferred from the foundation?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Could Eleanor move foundation funds without me?”
“Not legally in every circumstance. Practically? That depends on authorizations, signatures, and whether people asked questions.”
Camille remembered packets placed beside her breakfast plate. Roger’s yellow tabs. Eleanor saying, This one is routine. Grant pointing to the signature line while reading messages on his own phone.
“What happens if I signed?”
Dana’s expression softened by refusing to.
“Then we determine what you signed, what you knew, what you should have known, and who benefited.”
“I didn’t take anything.”
“Intent matters. So does negligence. So does your position.”
Camille pressed both hands around the coffee cup.
Her father had given her a board seat at twenty-two. She had treated it like an inheritance she could grow into later, after grief, after marriage, after pregnancy, after life became less complicated. Eleanor ran the meetings. Roger prepared the documents. Grant translated financial language into reassuring sentences at night.
You’re protected, he used to say.
Protected from what had never been specified.
A knock came at the door.
Dana closed the laptop before answering.
Marcus stood in the hallway wearing the same charcoal suit from the gala. Someone had given him a hospital blanket, which he had folded over one arm as if returning borrowed equipment.
“How is she?” Camille asked.
“Awake.”
“Come in.”
He looked at Dana. “Ms. Kessler.”
“You remember me.”
“I remember everyone Eleanor dislikes.”
“That saves time.”
Marcus entered but did not sit. His coat was gone. Melted snow had dried in pale lines along his shoes.
“Bianca wants to speak with Camille.”
Dana shook her head. “Not without counsel.”
“She won’t speak in front of a lawyer.”
“Then she doesn’t speak.”
Marcus turned to Camille. “She says Grant took three pages from a ledger and gave them to her for safekeeping.”
Camille’s fingers tightened around the cup.
“Where are they?”
“She hid them in the mansion.”
“Where?”
“She’ll tell Camille.”
Dana stood. “This has trap written all over it.”
Marcus’s severe eyes moved to her. “My daughter nearly died.”
“And may now face charges for burglary, theft, financial misconduct, or all three. Fear does not make a person harmless.”
“No,” he said. “It makes them afraid.”
Camille watched him. “Why did she help Grant?”
His jaw shifted.
“You should ask her.”
“Why did she help him, Marcus?”
He looked toward the window, where the man in the red hat pretended to examine his windshield.
“Because she believed he would leave you.”
The sentence landed softly. That made it harder to resist.
Camille looked down at her wedding ring.
“And the ledger?”
“She believed it proved Eleanor destroyed her mother.”
Dana stopped moving.
Camille raised her head. “What does that mean?”
Marcus’s face changed then, not dramatically, but enough for Camille to glimpse the exhausted man beneath the family protector.
“Bianca’s mother was Elise Vale. She worked in Sterling accounting twenty-nine years ago.”
Camille knew the name. It appeared once in her father’s ledger beside a question mark and the words severance—cash? There had also been an old photograph in the foundation archives: a young woman with olive skin standing beside Marcus at a company picnic, both of them laughing at someone outside the frame.
“Was she your wife?”
“No.”
“Did Eleanor know?”
“Yes.”
Dana leaned against the desk. “Start from the beginning.”
Marcus did not. People never did when ordered.
“Elise found irregular payments during the expansion of the original mountain lodge. She told your father. Before he could investigate, Eleanor accused her of stealing and had her dismissed. Elise signed an agreement, took a payment, and left the state.”
“Was she stealing?”
“I don’t know.”
“You believed Eleanor.”
“I worked for Eleanor.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Marcus looked at Camille.
“I believed the person who paid me.”
The honesty had weight.
“What happened to Elise?”
“She raised Bianca in Nevada. She died six years ago.”
“And you?”
“I sent money.”
Camille waited.
Marcus did not add love, visits, birthdays, or excuses. He simply stood in the cheap hotel room with a folded hospital blanket and allowed the missing years to remain visible.
Dana asked, “How did Bianca learn about the ledger?”
“Elise kept letters. One mentioned Camille’s father recording concerns in a private book. Bianca came here looking for it.”
“By sleeping with Grant?” Camille said.
Marcus flinched almost invisibly.
“She met Grant through the foundation’s media committee. He told her he could get access.”
“And she believed him.”
“She wanted to.”
Camille turned away.
Outside, the man in the red hat finally drove from the parking lot. Another car immediately took his place.
“Take me to the hospital,” she said.
Dana began to object.
May you like
“I’ll go with Marcus. You can come or not.”
“I’ll come,” Dana said. “I simply want the record to show that my client ignored my advice before I finished giving it.”
