What He Already Knows
706 Words
The next morning Adrian appeared at her apartment door at eight-fifteen with two coffees and the expression of someone who had decided to have a particular conversation.
She let him in because the contract technically entitled him to discuss shared obligations, and also because she wanted to see how he planned to approach it.
He put the coffees on her kitchen counter, looked around the apartment — spare, barely unpacked, functional — and then sat down across from her at the small table.
"Sophia Calloway," he said.
"Good morning to you too."
"How do you know her."
Mia wrapped both hands around her coffee cup. "We grew up in the same house for about six years. Her father married my mother. Not a close relationship."
"And Holt."
"He was engaged to me before he wasn't."
Adrian absorbed this without visible reaction. "He ended it."
"He helped Sophia end it." She kept her voice flat. "That's all I'll say about that."
He looked at her for a moment. Something moved in his expression — not sympathy exactly, just a re-assessment of something he'd been calculating. "All right," he said.
"That's it?"
"You told me you had things you were doing and I agreed not to ask. I'm not asking. I'm establishing what I already know so we don't waste time." He drank his coffee. "Sophia Calloway's foundation receives the majority of its funding from three corporate donors, one of which is a shell that traces back to a private holding account. The audits for the last two years have a forty-page gap."
She went still. "You had her investigated."
"I had you investigated. She was adjacent." He said it without apology. "The file is in my office if you want to see it."
She thought about the evenings she'd spent in her cell working out the sequence — what Sophia must have done, how she'd constructed the fraud, how she'd made it look like Mia's hands were on all of it. She thought about three years of knowing and having nothing to show for it.
"Yes," she said. "I want to see it."
He nodded. Stood up. "One o'clock. Come to the office."
He left. She sat with her coffee and tried to decide how she felt about the fact that he'd gotten further in forty-eight hours than she had in three years.
The file was comprehensive and maddening in equal measure. Comprehensive because his investigators were clearly very good. Maddening because someone had been there before them.
"These pages," she said, pointing. "The section on incoming transfers in 2021. It's been redacted."
"I noticed."
"Your people did this?"
"No." He sat back in his chair. "Someone else cleaned it before my team got there. Professional. They left enough to keep it looking intact."
Mia thought about that. Sophia was many things, but she wasn't this careful. Sophia operated on confidence and social architecture. Whoever had done this was different.
"There's someone above her," she said.
"That's my read."
She looked across the desk at him. He was watching her with that steady, measuring expression she was becoming familiar with, the one that gave nothing away but took everything in.
"You're not surprised," she said.
"No."
"You already thought that."
"Yes."
"And you don't know who it is."
A beat. "Not yet."
She held his gaze. There was something he wasn't telling her, she could feel the shape of it — the way a room felt different when a door had recently closed. She filed it away.
"Next week," she said. "Can I access this file again?"
"I'll have James make you a copy." He paused. "With the redacted sections flagged."
She nodded and stood to leave.
"Calloway," he said.
She turned.
"Whoever taught you to read a redacted document for what's missing rather than what's there." A pause. "That's not a skill most people have."
She picked up her bag. "Some lessons you learn the hard way," she said, and walked out.
She was in the elevator when her phone buzzed. An unknown number, but a text this time:
Stop looking at the foundation. That's not where it starts.
She stared at the message.
By the time she looked up the number, it was already disconnected.
- Writer
