Chapter 10 - THE QUIET ACCOUNTS
I had spent Christmas Eve insisting I would no longer be everyone's bank.
Now someone was trying to use the very accounts I had protected to pay the woman who had threatened my wife.
Daniel and the bank's fraud team secured the account, preserved the attempted-transfer records, and changed access privileges.
The failed attempt did not prove who had entered the request.
I resisted the urge to declare Rachel guilty on instinct.
At lunch Brittany asked to meet me at a quiet diner outside town.
She brought an envelope containing statements from the scholarship account and a list of transfers she had made.
"I started paying it back," she said.
"How much?"
"Not enough."
I studied the figures.
The missing amount was serious, but the honesty of her confession gave us a place to begin.
"Your daughter's education comes before protecting your reputation," I told her.
"We'll have a lawyer and an accountant sort out what must be restored."
She looked down at her coffee.
"I thought you hated me."
"I'm furious with what you did. That's different."
Brittany reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
Then she told me why Eleanor had been so confident.
Rachel had promised the family that a trust amendment would release a large sum once I was declared unable to manage the estate.
Eleanor expected a fee from that release.
"They thought it was already approved," Brittany said.
"Who told them that?"
"Rachel. She said she had spoken to a judge."
I felt a familiar tightening in my chest.
"Which judge?"
Brittany shook her head.
"I never heard a name."
When I returned home I found my neighbor Mrs. Alvarez waiting on the porch.
She was seventy-eight and had lived beside us since Justin was small.
"I saw someone coming out of your side door last night," she said.
"A young man in a delivery jacket."
She held up a blurry doorbell photograph.
The man's face was obscured, but his wrist displayed a distinctive silver watch.
I recognized it immediately.
It had been Patricia's anniversary gift to Adam.
I thanked Mrs. Alvarez and sent the photograph to Daniel.
He cautioned against confrontation.
That night, someone slipped a handwritten note beneath my front door.
You want the original recording? Come to the old boathouse alone.
The note contained a time.
11:30 p.m.
And beneath it, one final sentence.
May you like
Ask Adam what he did with the baby.
