The Merger

Chapter Ten: My Father's Letter

Elena,

If Gerald has finally given you this letter, it means one of two things has happened — either I'm gone, or a Wolfe has come back into your life in a way I always suspected eventually would. Possibly both. Knowing my luck, and yours, probably both.

Losing Cross & Wolfe wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me. I spent four years building something with a partner who saw my work as a means to his own ambition. I spent the twenty-six years after building something entirely my own, with you at the center of it, and I have never once regretted which version of my career I ended up with.

I suspect by the time you're reading this, you've already met his son. I've watched Damian Wolfe from a distance for years, and I want you to understand something clearly: he is not his father. I've seen the choices he's made when no one was forcing him to make them the hard way. I don't know what will happen between the two of you, if anything ever does. I only know that if he ever stands in front of you with a chance to do the right thing or the easy thing, I'd bet on him choosing the hard, right one — the same way I'd hope you'd choose it too.

I built Cross Architecture on the belief that legacy isn't about what someone takes from you. It's about what you build afterward, with whatever's left. Don't let my old wound decide what you do with yours.

I love you more than any blueprint I ever drew.

Dad.

Elena read it twice through blurred eyes before she set it down on Gerald's desk, four years of grief compressed suddenly into three handwritten pages. Underneath the grief, something else — permission. Her father, from four years in the ground, had somehow anticipated this exact moment and left her exactly what she needed to walk into it without the armor she'd built since Ashcombe.

Her phone buzzed on the desk. A text from Damian, sent minutes ago, before she'd even finished reading her father's final words to her.

I know about the leak. I know it was Gerald. I think I finally understand why. Elena — I need to see you before Thursday. There's something about my father's arrangement with yours I only just found out myself, and I don't think either of us fully understood what we've actually been standing in the middle of.

She folded the letter back into its envelope, tucked it into her bag, and typed three words before she could talk herself into waiting.

Tonight. My place.

His reply came back in under a minute.

I'm already on my way.