CHAPTER 9: WE
2453 Words
She lay there doing the thing she did when she couldn't afford to feel something she organised it. Put it in a box. Labelled the box. Stacked it somewhere internal where it would wait until she had time for it.
The photograph was in the box.
Maya's face was in the box.
The box was closed.
She got up at six. Showered. Dressed. Opened the notebook to a fresh page and wrote two words at the top.
*Victor Hale.*
That was today's problem.
That was the only problem she was allowed to have today.
---
Damien was already in his office when she knocked.
Door half open.
She was starting to understand the half open door. It meant he was there but somewhere else in his head. Working through something. The half open door was an accident not an invitation.
She knocked anyway.
He looked up.
Something crossed his face when he saw her. Quick. The particular expression of a man who had been thinking about something and just had that something walk through his door.
She filed it. Moved on.
"Victor Hale," she said. "What do you have on him."
He leaned back. "Sit down."
"I'm fine standing."
"Eloise."
She sat down.
He turned his monitor toward her. Spreadsheet. Names. Dates. A web of company connections that spread across the screen like something that had been growing in the dark for a long time.
"Victor Hale resigned from the Ashford board in October 2007," he said. "Quietly. No announcement. No farewell dinner. He was just — gone." He pointed at a name on the screen. "He set up three shell companies between 2004 and 2006. All of them dissolved by 2008. All of them untraceable unless you know exactly what you're looking for."
"And you know what you're looking for."
"I do now." He looked at her. "The USB filled in the last pieces."
She looked at the screen. At the web of names. At the careful invisible architecture of a man who had built his crime to look like nothing.
"Where is he now," she said.
"London. He runs a private equity firm. Small. Discreet." Damien paused. "Successful."
"Of course he is."
"He still has connections. People who owe him things. People he knows things about." He closed the spreadsheet. "Going after him directly won't work. He'll know before we move."
"So we go around him."
"We find someone he trusts. Someone on the inside."
She looked at the desk.
Thought about the photograph.
Thought about the box she'd put it in.
"I might have someone," she said carefully.
Damien looked at her. "The woman in the photograph."
"Maybe."
"Eloise—"
"I said maybe." She met his eyes. "Give me time."
He held her gaze for a moment. The particular way he looked at her when he was deciding how much to push and choosing not to.
"Fine," he said. "In the meantime we build the case. Everything on that USB. Cross referenced with what I already have." He pulled a second chair around to his side of the desk. "Come here."
She looked at the chair.
At his side of the desk.
At the distance between where she was sitting and where he was asking her to sit which was considerably smaller than any distance they had maintained since she arrived.
She got up.
Sat in the chair beside him.
He smelled like coffee and something she didn't have a name for and she was not going to think about that.
"These three companies," he said, pointing at the screen. "Cross reference them with the Barker Industries timeline and tell me where the overlap is."
"You could just tell me."
"I want to see if you find what I found."
She looked at the screen.
Started reading.
---
An hour passed without either of them noticing.
She found three overlaps. He'd found two. The third one made him go very still.
"How did you find that," he said.
"The date on the transfer doesn't match the company's registered activity period." She pointed. "It's three days off. Someone made a mistake."
"A three day window," he said slowly. "That's enough."
"Enough for what."
"Enough to prove the transfer was fraudulent." He looked at her. "That's the piece I was missing."
She looked at the screen.
At the three day window that Victor Hale had not known would matter.
At three years of her life suddenly clicking into focus like something that had always been slightly blurred.
"We need a lawyer," she said.
"I have one."
"A good one."
"The best one," he said. "She owes me a favour."
She looked at him sideways. "You collect favours."
"Doesn't everyone."
"Most people collect shoes."
Something happened at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The shape of one. The outline.
She looked back at the screen before she could think too much about it.
---
Maya appeared at noon with sandwiches.
She knocked on the office door with her elbow because her hands were full and looked at the two of them sitting side by side at Damien's desk with spreadsheets open and said absolutely nothing for three full seconds.
"I brought food," she said.
"Put it on the table," Damien said without looking up.
Maya put it on the table. Looked at Eloise. Eloise looked at the screen.
Something passed between them. The silent language. Maya's version of it said — *we are going to talk about this later and by talk I mean I am going to ask seventeen questions and you are going to pretend you don't know what I mean.*
Eloise's version said — *later.*
"Sebastian wants to know if you're coming to lunch," Maya said to the room generally.
"No," Damien said.
"I'll bring his back," Maya told Eloise.
"I'm fine."
"You haven't eaten since this morning."
"Maya."
"Eloise." She set a sandwich directly next to her hand on the desk. "Eat. You can destroy people on a full stomach just as effectively as an empty one. More effectively actually. Low blood sugar affects decision making. I read that."
Damien looked at Maya for the first time since she'd walked in.
Maya looked back at him with complete serenity.
"There's one for you too," she said. "On the table. You're welcome."
She left.
Damien looked at the sandwich on the table.
Looked at the one Maya had put directly next to Eloise's hand.
"She's terrifying," he said.
"She's the least terrifying person I know," Eloise said.
She picked up the sandwich.
Thought about the photograph face down on her bed upstairs.
Took a bite.
Tasted nothing.
---
Sebastian found them at two.
He leaned in the doorway with the easy energy of someone who had nowhere urgent to be and had decided this doorway was as good as anywhere.
"People are starting to talk," he said.
Damien didn't look up. "About what."
"About the fact that you've been in this office for six hours with your fiancée and haven't come up for air." He looked at Eloise. "The staff think it's romantic. Mrs. Paulson used the word devoted. I nearly fell down the stairs."
"We're working," Damien said.
"Sure." Sebastian's mouth did something. "Very convincing."
"Sebastian."
"I'm leaving. I'm already leaving." He looked at Eloise one more time. Something in his expression that was warmer than teasing. Quieter. "It's good," he said simply. "Seeing him like this."
He left before she could ask what he meant.
She didn't ask what he meant.
She already knew.
---
At four Damien leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling.
She'd learned this meant he was done for now. That his brain had hit a wall and was waiting for it to move.
She closed the document she'd been reading.
Stretched her neck.
They sat in the quiet for a moment.
"Can I ask you something," she said.
"You're going to regardless."
"Your father. The combination. He's known where this evidence was for years."
"Yes."
"And he just — sat on it."
Damien was quiet for a moment. "He was protecting someone."
"Who."
"Someone who wasn't worth it." He looked at the ceiling. "Someone who used our name and our resources and then disappeared and let my father carry the weight of it alone for twenty years."
She looked at him.
"Victor Hale," she said.
"They were friends." He said the word like it tasted wrong. "Before everything. My father trusted him." A pause. "He doesn't trust easily. He trusted Victor completely. And Victor—" He stopped.
"Used it," she said quietly.
"Yes."
She understood that. Sitting in a chair that wasn't hers in an office she'd come to dismantle. Understanding what it felt like to have someone you trusted completely be something you hadn't accounted for.
She understood it more than she wanted to.
"Damien," she said.
He looked at her.
First name. She'd used it without thinking.
He didn't point it out. Neither did she.
"We're going to find him," she said. "And when we do it's going to be airtight. Nothing he can walk away from."
He looked at her for a moment.
"Why does it sound different when you say it," he said.
"Because I mean it differently."
"How."
She held his gaze. "You want justice. I want it back. Everything that was taken. Every year. Every night my mother cried when she thought I was asleep. Every time my father apologised for something that wasn't his fault." She looked at the screen. "I want Victor Hale to know exactly what he cost and spend the rest of his life knowing he can't give it back."
The office was very quiet.
Damien looked at her with an expression she didn't have a category for. Something that had moved past assessment and past calculation and arrived somewhere she hadn't seen on his face before.
"Okay," he said quietly.
Just that.
*Okay.*
Like he'd decided something.
She looked away.
Outside the window the afternoon light was going gold over the east garden and the roses on the north wall were doing what they always did and somewhere in the house she could hear Maya laughing at something and the sound of it wrapped around her chest the way it always had and squeezed.
She thought about the photograph.
Thought about the box she'd put it in.
Felt the box shake slightly.
Pushed it back down.
*Think first*, she told herself. *Feel later.*
*Be wrong.*
*Please be wrong.*
---
That night she knocked on Maya's door.
Maya opened it in her pajamas with Theorem's travel carrier on the bed behind her — she'd brought him, of course she'd brought him, Maya went nowhere without that cat — and took one look at Eloise's face and stepped back to let her in.
Eloise sat on the bed.
Maya sat next to her.
Theorem walked across both of them like they were furniture.
"Talk," Maya said.
"I don't know where to start."
"Anywhere. Start anywhere."
Eloise looked at her hands. "We found something. In the house. Evidence of who actually destroyed my family."
Maya went still.
"Who," she said.
"A man called Victor Hale. Former board member. He used the Ashford name as cover and disappeared." She paused. "It's documented. We have the paper trail."
Maya was quiet for a moment.
Then — "So it wasn't the Ashfords."
"It was never the Ashfords."
Another pause.
"How do you feel," Maya said.
"I don't know yet."
"That's okay." Maya put her hand over Eloise's. Warm. Steady. Completely real. "You don't have to know yet."
Eloise looked at their hands.
Thought about the photograph.
Thought about saying it. About taking it out and putting it on the bed between them and watching Maya's face.
She didn't.
She couldn't.
Not yet.
Not until she was certain.
Not until she'd found one good reason why Maya Chen's face was in a photograph from 2005 standing next to Victor Hale.
"Maya," she said.
"Mm."
"Did you ever—" She stopped.
"Did I ever what."
She looked up.
Maya was watching her with open warm eyes. The eyes she'd known since she was eleven. The eyes that had never once in thirteen years looked at her with anything other than complete and total love.
"Did you ever doubt me," Eloise said instead. "When I said the Ashfords were responsible. Did you ever think I might be wrong."
Maya was quiet for a moment.
A moment that lasted exactly one second too long.
"No," she said. "I always believed you."
Eloise held her gaze.
"Yeah," she said softly. "I know."
She looked away.
Theorem walked into his travel carrier. Turned around three times. Sat down. Looked surprised by his own location.
Maya laughed.
The real laugh. Bright and sudden and completely her.
Eloise smiled despite everything.
Despite the box.
Despite the photograph.
Despite the one second that had lasted too long.
She smiled because Maya was laughing and thirteen years of muscle memory was stronger than one night of doubt.
For now.
---
She went back to her room at midnight.
Picked up the photograph from where she'd left it face down on the bed.
Looked at it.
Put it in the notebook between two pages.
Closed it.
Opened her door.
Damien was in the hallway.
Not waiting. Not walking. Standing at the window at the end of the corridor looking out at the east garden in the dark.
He heard her door.
Turned.
They looked at each other across the length of the hallway.
Neither of them said anything.
She didn't know who moved first.
Maybe neither of them did. Maybe the hallway just got smaller on its own.
They stood a few feet apart in the dark and the quiet of a house that was full of secrets and she looked at him and he looked at her and something in the air between them did what it had been doing since the garden. Since the office. Since *we.*
"You should sleep," he said quietly.
"So should you."
"I don't sleep well in this house."
"Neither do I."
A pause.
"We'll find him," he said.
"I know."
"And whatever else we find—" He stopped. Looked at her carefully. "We handle it."
She understood he meant the photograph. The woman he hadn't recognised. The something else she was carrying.
"We handle it," she said.
He nodded once.
Looked at her for one moment longer than necessary.
Went back to his room.
She stood in the hallway.
Breathed.
Went back to hers.
Opened the notebook.
Wrote the last thing she'd write that night.
*He said we again.*
Stared at it.
*Stop noticing that.*
Closed the notebook.
Turned off the light.
- Writer
