“Give me the phone.”
The device was old, cold, and nearly dead. A hairline crack ran across the screen. For one terrible second, Adrian thought it would not turn on.
Then the screen glowed.
There were only three files visible.
The first was an audio recording.
Malcolm’s voice changed. “Adrian, listen to me.”
Adrian pressed play.
Static filled the room. Then Mrs. Bell’s voice, breathless and frightened.
“Malcolm, don’t. Mr. Vale trusted you.”
A man answered, low and furious. “He trusts everyone until they become inconvenient.”
Adrian closed his eyes for half a second.
It was Malcolm.
There was a rustle, a thud, Mrs. Bell gasping. Then Malcolm again.
“You should have kept your hands out of my office.”
Mrs. Bell cried, “The hospital accounts, the transfers, Nora’s trust—he’ll find out.”
A crash followed. Then a sound Adrian had heard in nightmares without ever knowing its source.
Nora screaming.
The recording ended.
No one moved.
Outside the windows, the city continued as if the world had not split open inside one room.
Adrian looked at his brother. “You stole from her trust.”
Malcolm swallowed. “Temporary transfers. Investments. You were drowning in grief, and the board was nervous. I was protecting the company.”
“You pushed Mrs. Bell.”
“She slipped.”
“Nora saw you.”
Malcolm’s eyes darted to Nora, then away. That small movement confessed more than words could.
Adrian’s voice became very calm. “And when Nora fell?”
“I never touched Nora.”
Nora made a broken sound and gripped Adrian’s sleeve.
Tess spoke before anyone else could. “She ran because you saw her on the landing.”
Malcolm snapped, “Shut up.”
Nora flinched.
Adrian stepped between them. “Do not speak to either child again.”
Security arrived, two men in dark suits who stopped at the sight of Malcolm and hesitated. Adrian turned only his head.
“Take him to the east office. Lock the door. Call my attorney, the police commissioner, and the head of internal audit. No one from the board speaks to him. No one removes a file from this building.”
Malcolm laughed, but it was ragged now. “You think you can drag the Vale name through a scandal and survive it?”
Adrian looked at Nora, at the blue ribbon crushed in her fist, at the sheet music on her lap.
“The name can burn,” he said. “She survives.”
The guards took Malcolm by the arms.
He fought only when he passed Tess.
“You have no idea what you ruined,” he hissed at her.
Tess lowered her gaze.
But when he was gone, she whispered, “He wasn’t the only one.”
Adrian turned back.
The words should have exhausted him. Instead, they sharpened everything.
“Who else?”
Tess looked at Celia in the doorway, then at the guards, then at Nora.
Nora’s face had gone pale again, but she did not retreat into silence. Her lips moved. Nothing came out at first. Adrian knelt before her and waited, forcing himself not to beg.
Finally she whispered, “Doctor.”
Celia covered her mouth.
Adrian felt the room tilt.
“Which doctor?”
Nora’s eyes filled with shame, as if the answer were her fault.
Tess spoke carefully. “Mrs. Bell said someone kept telling Nora she imagined it. Someone gave her medicine that made her sleep whenever she tried to remember.”
Dr. Lionel Harth had been the first neurologist Malcolm
