I grabbed the ledger and my keys.
“Then let’s go.”
We drove through the night.
The city lights disappeared behind us, replaced by dark trees and empty highways.
Dad didn’t speak.
Neither did I.
The silence carried years of things neither of us knew how to say.
At dawn, we reached a gravel road leading to a weathered cabin.
The door creaked when we opened it.
Inside, everything was covered with dust, but the structure was still solid.
I placed the ledger on an old wooden table.
“Now what?”
Dad looked at it.
“Now we find out who really runs the network.”
He walked to the old kitchen stove, removed part of the cover, and reached inside.
When his hand emerged, he was holding another set of original records.
I stared at him.
“You think I didn’t have a backup?” he said wearily. “All these years, I kept my own copies. I never knew who to trust.”
He laid the papers beside Arthur’s ledger.
“So we build our case. From the ground up.”
I opened the first page.
The name at the top stopped me.
Vanessa Cole.
She wasn’t simply Daniel’s mistress.
She was the daughter of the man who had disappeared alongside Claire’s father.
The woman who had sat in the boardroom watching everything collapse had been playing a completely different game of her own.
I looked at Dad.
“We need to bring her down.”
“No,” he said.
“We need to bring her to our side.”
Before I could answer, my phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
The message contained a photograph.
Dad’s cabin.
Taken from the ridge above us.
Someone was already watching.
Below the photograph was a single sentence:
“Bring the ledger to the bridge at noon, or you’ll never see your mother again.”
