chapter 7
306 Words
### Chapter Seven: Ledger & Voss
The sign went up eight months later — new brass letters over the old Georgian brick, the kind of change that made the neighborhood gossip for weeks. *Ledger & Voss Auctions*, a name that honored two men who'd spent their last years protecting each other's secrets instead of exposing them, and two children who'd finally stopped paying for a war that was never really theirs.
Elena kept the compass on her desk now, in the office she shared with Damian, in the business they'd rebuilt out of ashes both literal and otherwise.
Some inheritances were bitter. Some took a decade to understand.
For a while, it felt like something worth keeping, and nothing more complicated than that.
It didn't last.
The email arrived on a Thursday, addressed to both of them, from a name neither recognized: *R. Fontaine, on behalf of the Fontaine Collection.*
"He's requesting a private viewing of the Voss-Cross archive," Damian said, reading over Elena's shoulder in the office they now shared. "Specifically the 1961 provenance ledgers. Your father's ledgers."
Elena's stomach dropped before her mind caught up to why. "Those are sealed. They're not for public viewing, they're barely for *our* viewing—"
"He says he has a legal claim to a piece your father sold in 1998. Says the documentation was falsified." Damian's jaw tightened in the way she'd learned meant he was already three steps ahead of her, already bracing for something. "Elena. That's the year of the fire."
She sat down slowly. "You think this is connected."
"I think," Damian said, "that we buried one truth eight months ago and told ourselves that was the only one."
Neither of them said what they were both thinking — that the past, once it started giving things up, rarely stopped at just one confession.
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