“Give me the drive.”
The clerk lifted his phone.
Victor noticed too late.
“Put that down,” he snapped.
The young man swallowed but kept recording.
Victor’s mask cracked. Not completely. Men like him do not explode unless the room is already theirs. But his eyes sharpened, and his hands opened at his sides.
“Mrs. Alden,” he said, using the formal name again. “You are about to make yourself responsible for matters you cannot possibly understand. There are investors, board members, regulators. There are people whose lives will be ruined if Elise’s unstable final actions are mishandled.”
“What about Elise’s life?”
He flinched.
Only a little.
“She stepped backward,” he said.
I had not asked how she fell.
The hallway went silent.
Even the buzzing light seemed to pause.
Victor realized his mistake. His mouth opened, then closed.
Behind him, a woman’s voice spoke from the stairwell.
“That’s enough.”
She stepped into the light wearing a gray raincoat, her white hair pinned low, her expression unreadable. She was tall, perhaps my age, perhaps older, with the posture of someone who had spent years being underestimated and found it useful.
On her left hand, a pale scar crossed the knuckles.
Victor went very still.
“Mara,” he said.
“Mr. Vale.”
The name struck him harder than any accusation.
She walked past him as though he were furniture and held out a hand to me.
“Mrs. Moreno, I’m Mara Chen. Your daughter retained me two weeks before she died.”
I gave her the drive because Elise had told me to. Then I gave her the letter. Then, because my legs suddenly felt hollow, I leaned against the lockers and clutched Elise’s ring until the gold left a mark in my palm.
Victor recovered quickly.
“This is absurd,” he said. “Anything on that drive is privileged company property.”
Mara looked at the clerk’s phone.
“Keep recording.”
The clerk nodded.
Victor’s jaw clenched.
“You have no idea what she did,” he said to me. “Your daughter was not some innocent victim. She lied. She hid money. She turned on everyone who helped build her.”
“She turned on thieves,” Mara said.
His eyes cut to her.
“Careful.”
“No,” I said.
They both looked at me.
My voice was shaking, but it was mine.
“You do not warn people in front of me anymore. You do not soften your threats and call them concern. You do not say my daughter was unstable because she finally saw you clearly.”
Victor’s face tightened with contempt.
“She put millions in the name of a woman who still hides cash in flour tins.”
“Yes,” I said. “Because she knew I would not sell her for it.”
For the first time, Victor had no answer.
Mara stepped between us.
“Mr. Vale, leave before I call the detective already reviewing Elise’s private affidavit.”
The word affidavit changed the air.
Victor looked from Mara to me to the phone in the clerk’s hand. Calculation moved behind his eyes. Then he adjusted his cuffs, as if the hallway had merely inconvenienced him.
“This will not bring her back,” he said.
I looked at Elise’s ring.
“No. But it may keep you from burying her twice.”
He left.
Not quickly. He would not give us that satisfaction. But his shoulders had lost their ease.
Mara waited until
