We gave ourselves exactly one full day of nothing happening before Garrick called us
back into the study, three cardboard boxes of Vivienne’s recovered files stacked on the
same table that had once held Callum’s warehouse footage, and I understood, watching
his face, that our nothing had officially run out again.
“I wanted more time before I brought this to you,” he said. “I didn’t get it.”
Odile was already at the table, sleeves pushed back, moving through the ledgers with
the brisk, unflinching efficiency of a woman who’d spent forty years learning to read her
former family’s handwriting for exactly this kind of buried truth. “Vivienne kept better
records than Callum ever did,” she said, not looking up. “Which means we’re finally
seeing the actual shape of what he built, instead
