Part 4
Adrian did not answer right away.
He stood there with two security guards holding his arms, his tie crooked, his breathing ragged, and for a moment I watched something I had never seen on my brother’s face before. Not anger. Not the cold confidence he wore like a second skin at every board meeting. Fear.
“Why?” I asked again, quieter this time. “Twelve years, Adrian. You let me believe I stole from my own family. You let Mom believe it too. Why?”
He looked at Claire first, as if she were the one he owed an explanation to, and then at me.
“Because Dad was never going to give me the company,” he said. “Not really. He talked about it like it was already mine, but he kept saying ‘we’ll see,’ ‘we’ll revisit it,’ like I was still twenty-two and needed to prove myself every single year. And then you came along being good at everything without even trying. Sports. School. People liked you. Dad liked you. I watched him look at you the way he never looked at me.”
“So you erased me,” I said.
“I protected what I built,” Adrian snapped, and some of the old fire came back into his voice. “I ran that company for twelve years. I kept it alive through two recessions. You were off building spreadsheets in Chicago, no idea what any of it cost me.”
The investigator, a calm, gray-haired woman named Renata Osei, stepped between us before I could respond. “Mr. Mercer,” she said to Adrian, “you’re going to want to stop talking until you have a lawyer present.”
“I don’t need—”
“You just admitted, on the record, in front of two board members, that you diverted company funds and altered a legal document,” Renata said. “I’d stop now.”
Martin Cross was still pounding on the glass door, and one of the guards finally opened it, more to stop the noise than anything else. Martin burst in, straightened his jacket, and immediately started talking fast, the way people do when they’ve rehearsed a version of events in the elevator on the way up.
“This is a misunderstanding,” he said. “Northstar was a legitimate vendor relationship that got mismanaged. I had no—”
“We just listened to a recording of you and Adrian discussing shutting down Northstar because Vantage’s fraud detection system was closing in,” Renata said flatly. “And discussing whose name to leave on the paperwork if it got discovered.”
Martin’s face went the color of old paper.
“That recording is inadmissible,” he said. “It was made without my consent, in a private residence—”
“It’s a two-party consent state,” Renata said, not looking up from her notes. “Mr. Mercer’s wife recorded a conversation she was a party to, in her own home, that she reasonably believed involved criminal activity affecting her. Your lawyer can argue otherwise in front of a judge, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
I watched Martin’s confidence drain out of him like water from a cracked glass. He looked at Adrian, and Adrian looked away, and I understood in that instant that whatever partnership they thought they had was already over. Men like that don’t stay loyal once the room turns against them. They start calculating who to blame.
“He came to me,” Martin said suddenly. “Adrian came to me eighteen months ago and said he had a vendor account he needed routed through our system for a legitimate reason. He said it was a family matter. I didn’t ask enough questions. That’s my failure. But I didn’t create Northstar. I didn’t forge anything.”
“You knew whose name was on it,” I said. “You knew it was mine. You sat in a room and talked about which one of us would take the fall if it came apart, and you decided it should be me, because I wasn’t in the room to defend myself.”
Martin didn’t answer that. He didn’t have to.
Claire had gone quiet, sitting very straight in her chair with her phone now resting on the table in front of her, screen dark, like a weapon she’d already fired and didn’t need to touch again. I looked at her and realized I hadn’t actually thanked her yet. I hadn’t said anything except what recording, and now the recording had already blown the room open.
“Claire,” I said. “How long have you known?”
“About Northstar? Four months,” she said. “About the will? Six weeks. I found the firebox when I was packing to leave. I almost didn’t open it. I told myself it wasn’t mine to open.” Her voice cracked slightly. “But I kept thinking about you at Thanksgiving, sitting at the end of the table like a guest in your own family, and I couldn’t do it anymore.”
One of the Vantage board members, a stocky man named Preston Vail who had said almost nothing until now, finally cleared his throat.
—END OF Chapter 2, —PRESS NEXT PART IN BOTTOM OF PAGE TO READ NEXT Chapter
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