THE LOVE WE LOST

Chapter 4: The Question He Never Asked

Detective Ray Solomon had the kind of face that made people confess things they hadn't meant to, weathered and patient in a way that suggested he had all the time in the world and nowhere better to be, and Nathaniel disliked him for it almost as much as he respected him.

"Mr. Brooks. Glad to see you upright." Solomon settled into the chair beside the hospital bed without waiting to be invited, notebook already open, pen uncapped like he'd been writing before he even walked in. "I'll keep this short, seeing as you're not exactly at full strength. Skid marks on the overpass don't match your account of losing control. There's paint transfer on your rear panel. Dark blue, aftermarket, not from your vehicle. Somebody hit you on purpose, and they knew what they were doing when they did it."

"I assumed as much." Nathaniel shifted against the pillows, the movement pulling at his ribs. "The angle felt wrong. Even before I lost control, it felt wrong."

"You have enemies, Mr. Brooks?"

Nathaniel almost laughed, though it would have hurt too much to actually manage it. "I run a company worth eleven figures. I have a list longer than this hospital stay."

"Anyone recent? Anyone with a grudge specific enough to try to kill you over it? This wasn't a warning, Mr. Brooks. Whoever did this wanted you dead, not scared."

Nathaniel thought of the audit. Of James's face in the doorway, tired and grim. Of a five-year-old paper trail that shouldn't exist, buried in accounts nobody had touched since before the divorce. "My Chief of Staff found some irregularities in our books. Old transactions. I don't have details yet, but he's working on it."

Solomon wrote that down without looking up, his pen moving in short, economical strokes. "How old?"

"Five years."

Something flickered across the detective's face. Brief, professional, gone almost before Nathaniel caught it, but there all the same, like a man recalculating something in real time. "That's a specific number."

"It's the year my marriage ended."

Solomon looked up then, fully, and Nathaniel realized, too late, that he'd said more than he meant to, that the words had come out of some part of him that was tired of carrying them alone. "Tell me about that."

"It's not relevant."

"Let me be the judge of that, Mr. Brooks. In my experience, nothing that makes a man's voice change like that is irrelevant."

Nathaniel closed his eyes briefly, the ache in his ribs nothing compared to the ache of dragging a five-year-old wound back into the light, into a room with fluorescent lights and a stranger with a notebook. "I was shown evidence that my wife was unfaithful. Photographs. Messages, supposedly between her and another man. I believed it. I ended the marriage without giving her a chance to explain herself, without asking a single question I should have asked."

"Who showed you the evidence?"

The question landed like a stone dropped into still water, and Nathaniel felt the ripples spread through everything he thought he'd understood about that night, about the last five years, about the version of the story he'd told himself so many times it had calcified into fact.

He opened his mouth to answer, and stopped.

Because for the first time in five years, he actually tried to remember. Not the hurt, which he remembered perfectly, in exhausting, humiliating detail. Not the certainty, which had carried him through the divorce like armor. The actual, literal memory of whose hands had placed that folder in his, of the room he'd been standing in, of the voice that had told him to look inside.

And he couldn't.

"I don't remember," he said slowly, the words strange and unwelcome in his mouth, like admitting to a crime he hadn't known he'd committed. "I don't remember who gave it to me. I've been trying to picture it for the last thirty seconds, and there's just nothing there."

Solomon's pen stilled over the page. "That doesn't strike you as odd?"

It did. It struck him as very odd indeed, and the wrongness of it crawled up his spine like something cold and patient that had been waiting five years, quiet and undisturbed, for someone to finally think to look for it.

"Detective." His voice came out rougher than he intended, rougher than he'd meant to let it. "I think someone destroyed my marriage on purpose. I think they planned it carefully enough that I still can't remember how it happened. And I think whoever it was just tried to make sure I never lived long enough to figure that out."

Solomon studied him for a long moment, the kind of look that had probably unraveled better liars than Nathaniel in interrogation rooms far less comfortable than this one. "I'm going to need the names of everyone who had access to you during that period. Assistants, board members, family. Anyone who could have gotten close enough to plant something convincing."

"That's half my company, Detective."

"Then we start narrowing it down." Solomon closed his notebook, but didn't stand up yet. "In my experience, Mr. Brooks, people don't go to this much trouble over money alone. Whoever did this wanted something more than your bank accounts. They wanted you broken first. That takes patience. That takes someone who knew exactly where to cut."

The words settled over Nathaniel like a weight he hadn't been braced for, and for the first time since the accident, the fear wasn't about the crash at all. It was about how many people had stood close enough to him, for long enough, to know precisely where he was softest, and how completely he'd trusted every one of them without ever once questioning why.

After Solomon left, Nathaniel lay back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling for a long time, running through faces from five years ago: board members, assistants, his mother's oldest friends, people who'd sat across from him at dinner and asked about Elena with what he'd always assumed was ordinary curiosity. Somewhere in that list was the answer, buried under years of routine and misplaced trust, and he intended to find it before whoever had done this got a second chance to finish the job.