Miss CEO, EX-Convict

Not His Handwriting

The woman on the phone was named Denise, and she didn't ask why I wanted the interview at eleven at night instead of during business hours. She just said the building had a night entrance and gave me a floor.

Denise turned out to be younger than her voice, with a lanyard that said CONTRACTOR instead of a name. She didn't ask me for ID beyond the name Vale. She handed me a laptop, a temporary badge, and a folder of NDAs thick enough that I signed the last page without reading the middle of it, same as I hadn't read the papers at intake.

"You'll be working out of the annex," she said. "Nobody uses it after six. Bathroom's down the hall, code's on the door."

"What am I looking for?"

"Due diligence. Reyes Group escrow filings, the ones from the acquisition attempt three years back. Somebody upstairs wants a second set of eyes before we make another run at them." She paused at the door. "You'll want coffee. The pot in the annex hasn't been cleaned since before I started here."

I said I'd manage. She left, and I sat down at a desk with a chair that leaned to one side no matter how I adjusted it, the coffee pot behind me already ticking on a timer nobody had reset.

The files loaded slow. I spent the first hour just learning the filing structure, folders inside folders, half of them named with initials that meant nothing to me yet. My eyes kept sliding to the clock in the corner of the screen. It said 11:47 for longer than felt right. When I looked again it said 1:12. An hour gone, and I hadn't felt it pass.

I found the escrow documents around two. Standard stuff, transfer requests, wire confirmations, signatures at the bottom of pages that all looked the same after the fortieth one.

Then a name caught. My eyes had been doing the reading for hours without my brain keeping up, and this one finally landed.

Reyes Family Trust, Disbursement Authorization. Dated six weeks before my sentencing.

I pulled the ledger page out of my bag, the one from the envelope, the one I'd been carrying folded into a paperback since the bus stop. I laid it flat next to the laptop screen.

Same transaction number. Same amount. The signature on my ledger page was the one I'd assumed for three years belonged to Julian, because who else would it belong to. Julian ran the trust. Julian signed everything.

I zoomed in on the digital copy until the letters blew up too big to read as a whole word, just shapes.

It wasn't his hand.

The J started wrong. Julian's J always looked rushed, a straight line with barely a hook at the bottom, because he wrote it a hundred times a day and stopped caring what it looked like around year two of running the company. This J had a hook. A real one. Curled back on itself. Someone had taken the time to make it look deliberate.

I sat there a long time. Not thinking anything specific. Just looking at a hook in a letter that wasn't supposed to matter, holding a folded piece of paper next to a screen at two in the morning in an office nobody used after six.

"That's not his handwriting," I said, out loud, to the annex, to nobody.

I closed the laptop. I didn't open it again.

My knee wouldn't stop bouncing under the desk, and it took me a second to notice I was doing it, longer than I'd have liked.

Elena Reyes signed the paper that ended my life. Elena Reyes, who had a funeral, a closed casket, a family standing in black in a photo I still hadn't been able to throw away. Elena Reyes, whose initial was on the back of a business card in my coat pocket right now, four words above it in handwriting that wasn't the ledger's either.

Two different hands. Three, if I counted whoever added the phone number after the fact.

Elena hadn't acted alone. I needed to know who else had a hand in this before I walked back into that building in the morning.