She began her search in earnest on a quiet Monday morning when the penthouse was empty and Dara had gone to run household errands. She had been thinking about how to do this carefully for two weeks, and she had decided that careful, in this context, meant systematic. Not emotional. Not urgent. Systematic.
She had three threads to pull. The first was the Hale Foundation — its history, its registered activities, its leadership at the time of the incident that took her hearing. The second was Edmund Blackwood, Lucien's father, and his known business associations during that period. The third was the incident itself, which she had partial records of and had never been able to fully reconstruct.
She worked through her laptop at the desk in her study with the door closed and the window open to
