Chapter 15
NORA
He was quiet for a long moment, his hands wrapped around his own untouched cup, and when he spoke again his voice had lost some of its edge, replaced by something older, more tired.
"My family had a company once," he said. "Smaller than Whitmore's, but solid, built the same slow way most real things get built. My father ran it. My mother handled the finances, quiet, careful, better with numbers than anyone gave her credit for. When I was seventeen, there was an accident. A fire, at one of our warehouses. My father died in it. The official story was faulty wiring."
"And the real story?"
"I didn't know there was a different story until years later," he said. "My mother started acting strange after the funeral. Paranoid, careful about who she talked to, careful about mone
