What He doesn’t know I have

What the paper showed

Chapter 8

What the Papers Showed

It took them three hours to get through it, sitting in the back booth long after the breakfast crowd had thinned out and the barista had started giving them looks.

"This part," Chris said, sliding a page across the table, tapping it. "This is the part I don't fully get. There's a company here, Hawkridge Capital, that shows up about four months before the bankruptcy filing. It's named as a creditor. But it's also named, three pages later, as a shell registered to an address that traces back to one of Dad's old business partners."

Robert went still, reading it twice. "Hawkridge." He said the name like it tasted bad. "I know that name."

"You do?"

"It was one of the firms that called my CFO, back when I was still trying to save the company. Offered to buy a chunk of our debt at a discount, take some pressure off." Robert's jaw tightened. "I said no. I didn't like the terms. A month later we were in default on loans I didn't even know my CFO had taken out in the company's name."

Chris went pale. "You think your own guy was working with my dad."

"I think," Robert said slowly, "that somebody fed your father exactly enough information, at exactly the right moments, to make sure every move I made to save the company actually sealed it instead." He sat back, exhaled hard through his nose. "I always wondered how he knew. How he was always one step ahead of decisions I hadn't even made public yet. I told myself I was paranoid."

"You weren't."

"No." Robert gathered the pages, squared them, his hands steadier than his voice. "I wasn't."

Chris watched him for a moment, hesitant. "What do we do with it?"

"Not enough yet." Robert tapped the folder. "This proves something happened. It doesn't prove your father did it, not in a way a lawyer could use, not in a way that survives him hiring better lawyers than both of us combined. We need the name behind Hawkridge. We need whoever signed for it." He looked up at Chris. "Can you get back into that cabinet again?"

Chris's stomach dropped slightly. "Not without him noticing this time. He's already weird about that office. Locked it twice this week, which he never used to do."

"Then we find another way in." Robert was already pulling out his phone, scrolling, thinking out loud as much as talking to Chris. "I have a forensic accountant I trust. She helped me untangle some of my own mess after the bankruptcy. If I send her this, she might be able to trace Hawkridge's filings without us breaking into anything."

"How long would that take?"

"Days. Maybe a week, if she's not already buried in other work." Robert glanced up at him. "I know that's not fast. I know your timeline isn't days, it's..." He stopped himself, softening. "It's whatever your mother has left."

Chris's throat worked. "Yeah."

"Then we move on two tracks," Robert said. "The accountant does this properly, quietly, in a way that holds up. And you keep your eyes open at home. Not breaking in again. Just watching. If he's nervous about that office now, it means he already suspects something's off. People who think they're being watched make mistakes. We let him make one."

Chris nodded slowly, turning the plan over. "And if he doesn't make a mistake?"

Robert's expression didn't change, but something in his voice went colder. "Everyone makes one eventually. He made his seven years ago. He just doesn't know I finally found it."

Chapter 9

Charlotte's Doubt

Charlotte was waiting when Robert got back to the apartment, arms crossed, standing in the middle of the living room like she'd been pacing it for a while.

"You brought a teenager into this."

"He's nineteen. And he came to me." Robert set his keys down, tired in a way that went past the physical. "I didn't recruit him, Charlotte. He walked into my office and got dragged out by security trying to find me."

"That's not better." Her voice was sharp, controlled, the kind of calm that came from someone working very hard not to raise it. "Robert, do you understand what happens if this goes wrong? If Michael finds out his own son has been digging through his files, photographing them, handing them to the man Michael ruined? That's not a business dispute anymore. That's the kind of thing that makes people do reckless things to protect themselves."

"I know what's at stake."

"Do you?" She crossed the room, stood close, made him look at her. "Because I have spent three years building you back into someone who could survive a fight like this. Quietly. Carefully. And the first real lead you get, you bring in a nineteen-year-old with a dying mother and a grudge, who has zero experience hiding anything from anyone, and you're betting all of it on him not cracking under pressure."

Robert didn't answer right away. He sat down heavily on the arm of the couch, rubbing a hand over his face. "He's not wrong to want this, Charlotte. What Michael did to his mother..."

"I'm not saying he's wrong to want it." Her voice gentled, just slightly, though the tension didn't leave her shoulders. "I'm saying wanting something badly enough doesn't make you good at getting it without getting hurt. I would know."

Something in the way she said it made Robert look up. "What does that mean?"

Charlotte was quiet for a beat too long. "It means I've watched people with good reasons make terrible decisions before. It doesn't end well for the people with the good reasons. It ends well for whoever's calculating instead of feeling." She moved to the window, arms wrapping around herself, looking out at the city instead of at him. "Before I met you, I did work for people who needed things found. Hidden assets. Buried debts. The kind of work that taught you exactly how careful you have to be when you're trying to take something apart without anyone noticing until it's already done." A pause. "I'm good at this, Robert. I'm good at it because I learned to be cold about it. Chris isn't cold. Chris is bleeding all over this, and bleeding people make noise."

Robert absorbed that, filing away the parts of her past she'd just handed him without quite meaning to. "So what do you want me to do? Tell him no? Send him home to wait for his mother to die not knowing if any of this mattered?"

"I want you to compartmentalize him." Charlotte turned back to face him. "He gets nothing that traces back to him if it goes wrong. No documents in his name, no fingerprints on anything we send to a journalist or a regulator. He watches, he reports, and everything that actually moves the needle happens through people who know how to disappear from a sentence if they need to." Her eyes held his. "And Sophie doesn't come anywhere near this. Not Chris, not Robert Thompson's revenge plot, none of it. If this blows up loud enough to make headlines, I will not have my daughter's name anywhere near the wreckage."

"Our daughter," Robert said quietly.

Charlotte's expression flickered, something old and tired moving behind her eyes. "Our daughter," she agreed, after a moment. "Which is exactly why I need you to be smarter than your anger right now, Robert. For her sake, if not for yours."

He crossed the room, took her hands, held them. "Okay," he said. "Compartmentalized. Careful. Your way."

"My way," she repeated, and let out a breath that sounded like it had been held for longer than just this conversation. "Now show me everything that kid gave you. I want to see exactly how much danger we're actually in."