Chapter 7: Gerald Foss
Adrian called his driver while I was still staring at my phone.
"Change of destination," he said into his own phone.
"Not the facility.
Take us to the Hargrove address I sent you last month." He listened.
"Yes.
Now."
He ended the call and looked at me.
"That was her," I said.
It wasn't a question.
"Almost certainly."
"She's been watching us tonight."
"She's been watching longer than tonight." He held the door.
"The lockbox at your mother's facility — can your mother open it remotely?
Tell a nurse the combination?"
"She can barely use her phone.
The combination is written inside a birthday card in her nightstand drawer." I stopped.
"Which means if someone is already in that room—"
"They haven't found it yet or they would have left." Adrian's voice was steady.
"The card is hidden inside a birthday card.
That's not the first place anyone looks."
"We need someone we trust inside that building right now."
"I know." He was already typing.
"I'm sending someone.
Not one of my father's people.
Someone outside the Group entirely."
We got into the car.
The city moved past the windows.
I kept thinking about my mother asleep in that room, the oxygen machine cycling, a stranger standing in her doorway.
"Tell me about Foss," I said.
"Everything."
Adrian looked out the window for a moment.
"Gerald Foss came to my father in 1993.
My father was building fast and needed legal cover for acquisitions that weren't entirely clean.
Foss provided it.
He was brilliant at it.
Over time he became indispensable — not just as an attorney but as an architect.
He structured things so that my father couldn't fully understand his own empire without Foss explaining it."
"He made your father dependent."
"Deliberately.
And my father trusted him the way you trust someone who's never given you a reason not to." Adrian's jaw tightened.
"What my father didn't know was that Foss had been building a parallel structure for years.
Shell companies.
Redirected fees.
A quiet accumulation of co-signatory rights.
By the time I started seeing it, he controlled access to roughly forty percent of the Group's liquid assets."
"He's been stealing from your father."
"Repositioning.
That's the word he'd use.
And because he controls the legal documentation, proving it requires getting to records he doesn't know exist." Adrian glanced at the folder on the seat between us.
"Records like Margaret's."
"What does Margaret's file prove?"
"That the Hargrove acquisition was structured on fraudulent compliance certifications.
Foss forged them.
Margaret found out and documented everything before she disappeared.
If that documentation surfaces, every contract Foss built on top of that acquisition becomes legally questionable.
Thirty years of work.
Gone."
"And Foss goes to prison."
"If the right people receive the right documents, yes." Adrian looked at me.
"That's why your mother matters.
That's why she's been protected.
And that's why Foss sent someone to your diner last Tuesday.
He's been watching your mother for years, waiting to see if she'd ever move the documents.
When she didn't, he shifted to watching you."
"Because I'm the one who'd go get them if she couldn't."
"You're the one who already would have, without knowing what they were."
The car stopped.
A narrow street.
An older building, dark except for one lit window on the third floor.
"She's here," Adrian said.
I looked up at the window.
"Does she know we're coming?"
"She called you," he said.
"She's been waiting."
We got out of the car.
The front door opened before we reached it.
A woman stood in the frame.
Older than the photograph by twenty-three years.
White at her temples.
Thinner.
But the eyes were the same as the ones I'd seen in Vincent Moretti's face across a diner counter.
"Emily Carter," she said.
"You look like your mother."
My throat closed.
"You need to come inside," Margaret said.
May you like
"Foss knows about this address.
We have maybe two hours."
