CHAPTER FOUR
1181 Words
Ethan's Pov
She said it and then she walked toward the exit like she hadn't just detonated something.
I stood there for exactly three seconds before I followed her.
The car was already waiting. She got in first and sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes forward and I got in beside her and the door closed and I looked at her and said nothing for a moment because I was trying to decide if she was being manipulative or if she actually knew something.
Her hands were cold. I noticed that when I sat close enough. And Nora Lane, from everything I had observed in the past week, was not dramatic. She didn't perform. She didn't reach for attention. She was the most self-contained woman I had ever been forced into proximity with which made what she just said impossible to dismiss.
"Explain," I said.
She turned to look at me. "Your father made an arrangement with Richard Voss. I don't know all of it but I heard enough. It involves keeping me in that house for the full term and Richard staying quiet about something. Victor called it an arrangement. He said Richard knew the terms."
I kept my face still. "You overheard a private conversation."
"I took a wrong turn. I wasn't looking for it." She held my gaze. "I'm telling you because it involves you and you deserve to know. What you do with it is your business."
I looked at her for a long moment. Then I turned back to the window.
She didn't push. She didn't ask what I was thinking or try to fill the silence with more words. She just sat there and let me process it and I found that more unsettling than if she had.
I didn't sleep that night.
I went over what she said and laid it against what I knew. The merger justification my father had presented was clean and logical and I had accepted it because Victor Blackwood did not make emotional decisions. He made calculated ones. Everything he touched had a reason behind it and the reason he gave me made sense so I didn't look further.
That was on me.
I called Daniel at seven in the morning and told him I needed everything on the Lane family debt acquisition. When it was purchased, who authorized it, which legal team processed it. Daniel asked no questions. He said he would have it within the hour.
He had it in forty minutes.
I sat at my desk and read through it and the first thing that was wrong was the timeline. The debt was acquired six months before the legal threat my father cited as the reason for the merger. Six months. That meant Victor knew about the Lane holdings long before the crisis that supposedly made this marriage necessary. He had been sitting on it and waiting.
For what, I didn't know yet.
The second thing that was wrong was a name. Helena Lane appeared not just as Nora's aunt but as a co-guarantor on the original debt instrument. Which meant she had a financial stake in how this was resolved. Which meant the woman who had delivered Nora to that contract signing had her own reasons for making sure Nora signed.
I thought about Nora's face at dinner Thursday. The way she watched Helena. The way her expression stayed pleasant and gave nothing away. She had already noticed something. She just hadn't told me.
I wasn't sure why that bothered me.
I found my father in his study at nine.
He was reading. He looked up when I came in and closed the book and waited, which was what Victor Blackwood did when he knew a conversation was coming and wanted to control the pace of it.
I sat down across from him. I put the debt timeline on his desk.
"Six months," I said. "You had this six months before you called me into this office with an ultimatum."
He looked at the document. Then he looked at me.
"The timing of acquisition and the timing of necessity are two different things," he said.
"What is the arrangement with Richard Voss?"
A pause. Small but there. "Richard and I have a business understanding."
"That involves my wife staying in my house."
"That involves the contract being honored in full." He folded his hands. "Richard has information that could create complications for this company. His silence is contingent on the marriage remaining intact for the full term. It is a practical arrangement and it changes nothing about the outcome."
I stared at him. "You used Nora as a guarantee."
"I used the marriage as a guarantee. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
He held my gaze without flinching. He had been doing that since I was twelve years old and it had worked every time because I had always eventually decided that Victor knew best and moved on. He was counting on that now. I could see it in the steadiness of him.
"What does Richard need to stay quiet about," I said.
"That is not relevant to you."
"It became relevant to me when you put my name on a contract without telling me the real reason for it."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "The company comes first. It has always come first. You know that."
I stood up. I picked the document off his desk.
"I know that," I said. "I'm starting to think I should have questioned it sooner."
I left before he could respond.
****************”
I came back to the apartment at noon and Nora was in the kitchen. She looked up when I walked in and waited. She didn't ask how it went or what I had found. She just waited and that restraint was starting to feel like the most honest thing in my life.
"You were right," I said.
She nodded once. No satisfaction in it.
"How long have you suspected Helena?" I asked.
"Since the night of the dinner." She paused. "Her signature is on the debt document as guarantor. She had reasons of her own for making sure I signed."
I pulled out the chair across from her and sat down. This was the longest conversation we had ever had and we were having it about the people who had put us both in this room.
"What do you want to do," I said.
She looked at me steadily. "I want to know everything first. All of it. Then I'll decide."
I nodded. That was fair.
My phone buzzed on the table between us. I glanced at the screen.
It was a message from Camille.
" We need to talk. I know something about Nora that you don't. Meet me tonight."
I looked up. Nora was watching my face and she had seen enough of it to know something had shifted.
"What is it?" she said.
I turned the phone over face down.
"Nothing that can't wait," I said.
But it wasn't nothing and we both knew it.
- Writer
