allowed near the table.
The pregnancy erased the last excuse.
Elise drove downtown with Sabrina’s headlights following through wet streets until she turned into a brightly lit gas station on Division and parked beside an empty air pump. Sabrina pulled in thirty seconds later and crossed the concrete in her cream coat, furious and frightened.
‘What did you do?’ she demanded through the half-open window.
Elise got out of the car. The station lights buzzed overhead. ‘Do you want the short version or the honest one?’
‘The bank froze my wire.’ Sabrina’s mascara had begun to gather at the corners. ‘Dad says you reported the company.’
‘I reported crimes.’
Sabrina scoffed on instinct, but the certainty did not hold. Elise showed her the board resolution Micah had sent: uploaded at 9:07 p.m., naming Elise managing member of Falcon Harbor LLC and personally guaranteeing the bridge loan tied to Sabrina’s brownstone. Elise’s signature had been cut from an old scanned document and dropped into place. Sabrina’s digital approval sat beneath it, timestamped for a moment when she had been upstairs pouring champagne.
‘I didn’t sign that,’ Sabrina said.
‘I know.’
The pavement seemed to tilt beneath Sabrina’s heels. ‘They used my login.’
‘They used both of us.’
For the first time in memory, Sabrina looked not favored but trapped. Fear took the polish off her face.
Micah called while they stood there. The freeze was moving, he said. But Grant’s keycard had just accessed the records server from Harrow headquarters, and Celeste’s office terminal was tied to the upload. If hard-copy support for the forged chain existed, it would disappear tonight.
Sabrina closed her eyes, then reached into her bag and pulled out a garage fob and a black access card.
‘There’s a blue ledger in Dad’s safe,’ she said. ‘I saw it last week. Project codes. Ashland. Mercer. Falcon. Mom told him after dinner to burn the paper trail before the bank asked for originals.’
Elise stared at the card in Sabrina’s hand. All those years, she thought, and this was what it finally took to make them sisters: the realization that their parents would forge either daughter the second affection became inconvenient.
Micah told Elise not to go upstairs alone. He would meet her in the garage with prosecutors’ duty contacts already alerted.
Ten minutes later Elise swiped into the parking level beneath Harrow Restoration Group and rode the elevator to the thirty-second floor with her heart pounding against her ribs like a fist.
The corridor was lit.
Grant’s office door stood open.
Micah was already there with a bank investigator and an assistant state’s attorney whose coat was still half buttoned. Inside the office, Grant Harrow stood at the credenza feeding papers into a crosscut shredder.
For a ridiculous second Elise noticed only the domesticity of it: her father in shirtsleeves, jaw clenched, behaving less like a titan and more like an old man cleaning up before company arrived.
Then he saw her.
‘What the hell is this?’ he snapped, straightening. ‘You bring strangers into my office at midnight?’
The assistant state’s attorney stepped forward, calm and clipped. ‘Mr. Harrow, you’ve been advised to preserve all records related to the Falcon Harbor entities. Please step away from the shredder.’
Celeste’s voice came from Grant’s speakerphone on the desk,
