Chapter 9 - Before I Ever Met Her
Detective Ellis took the burner phone into evidence.
I stood in Claire’s old office staring at Victoria’s message.
Did you get the ledgers?
Not “papers.” Not “documents.”
Ledgers.
She knew exactly what was in the safe.
Back at the estate, Charles and I built a timeline.
Four years before I met Victoria, Hale Maritime had purchased warehouse land from three shell companies. Those companies traced back to Vance Development Holdings.
The prices were inflated.
Millions had moved out of Hale Maritime.
Claire had noticed.
Then she died before she could finish tracing it.
“I’m not saying her death is connected,” Ellis warned me over the phone. “There is no evidence of that. Don’t jump there.”
I didn’t.
But I did ask the question I had been avoiding.
“Did Victoria meet me by accident?”
No one answered.
The charity gala where we first met had been sponsored by Vance Development.
Victoria had approached me first.
At the time, it felt flattering.
Now it felt arranged.
Lily came into the study carrying the broken music box in a towel.
“Can Mr. Alvarez fix it?” she asked.
Mr. Alvarez was the antique restorer Claire used to love.
“I’ll call him tomorrow.”
Lily nodded, then looked at the ledgers.
“Victoria hated that book.”
I froze.
“What book?”
She pointed to the oldest ledger.
“You showed it to her once. She yelled after I went upstairs.”
I had no memory of that.
“When?”
“Before Christmas.”
Anna looked at me sharply.
That Christmas, Victoria had convinced me I was working too much. She had started bringing me tea in the study every night.
Tea that often made me unusually tired.
A ridiculous thought entered my head.
Then a worse memory followed.
Two weeks after Christmas, I had fainted during a board dinner.
May you like
Doctors called it exhaustion.
Victoria had been the one who insisted they were right.
