She called Alexander that same night, after the boys were down and Kane had gone to his office and the encrypted file was still open on his phone where she'd left it. She called him directly, not through Tyler, not through the group thread. She wanted his voice without a buffer.
He answered on the second ring.
"I know why you're calling," he said.
"Then start talking."
A pause. In six months she had learned Alexander's silences the way you learn weather patterns — this one was the pause of a man who had prepared for this conversation and was choosing where to begin.
"In the third month," he said. "When we launched Kingsley Dynamics and Damian froze your old joint accounts — there was a window before the Kingsley inheritance cleared fully into the operating structure. Two of our overse
