Chapter 6: The Longest Night
Fiona slept through all of it.
Wendy had brought her home at seven, handed her off at the front door with a look that asked a hundred questions and asked none of them out loud, then walked back to the guest cottage without being invited inside.
I watched from the hallway.
Jessi took Fiona upstairs.
I locked the front door.
I sat in my study until midnight with Daniel's box open on the desk.
The documents were meticulous.
Eight years of careful, frightened record-keeping — transfer confirmations, internal memos, account routing numbers, a series of emails between Reeves and a name I didn't recognize that appeared fourteen times across different documents.
The name was Harlan.
No last name in any of the correspondence.
Just Harlan.
I photographed every page with my phone and sent the images to an encrypted folder Grace had set up before she left.
At twelve-thirty, Jessi appeared in the doorway in her robe.
She looked at the papers spread across the desk and then at me.
"Come to bed," she said.
"Soon."
She came in and sat in the chair across from the desk.
The same chair I'd sat in earlier, when the positions had been reversed.
She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, the way she used to sit when we were first married and she'd keep me company while I worked late.
"I need to ask you something," she said.
"Go ahead."
"When you followed us today — when you saw Daniel — what did you think?
In that first second, before Wendy said anything.
What did you actually think?"
I considered the question honestly.
"I thought something was being hidden from me.
I didn't know what.
I thought it was about Daniel.
I didn't think it was about me."
"You didn't think I was having an affair."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you're not that person." I looked at her.
"And because the fear on Fiona's face wasn't the fear of a child keeping a romantic secret.
It was something older than that."
Jessi was quiet for a moment.
"I should have told you about Daniel years ago."
"Yes."
"I was protecting him."
"I know."
"And I was protecting myself," she said.
"From having to find out I was wrong about you.
Or right." She looked down at her hands.
"Either answer was going to cost me something."
"It cost you eight years."
"Yes." Her voice was very quiet.
"It did."
I got up from behind the desk and sat on the edge of it, closer to her.
"I'm not asking you to have been braver than you were.
I'm asking you not to do it again."
She looked up.
"Do what again?"
"Decide alone.
Whatever comes next — whatever Grace finds, whatever Reeves does, whatever this Harlan name turns out to be — I need you to be in the room with me.
Not managing it from the outside."
She held my gaze for a long moment.
Then she nodded.
Once.
Slowly.
"Okay," she said.
It wasn't forgiveness.
It wasn't resolution.
It was something smaller and more real — a door left open instead of locked.
I went back to the documents.
At one-forty in the morning, I found the name Harlan again — this time in a different context.
Not in an email.
In a handwritten note Daniel had included at the bottom of a folder, with a small asterisk beside it.
*Harlan — not a person.
Internal code name.
Used in Reeves's correspondence to refer to the primary account holder.
I was never able to identify who.*
I stared at the note for a long time.
Primary account holder.
Not Reeves.
Someone above Reeves.
I pulled up the transfer confirmation Jessi had found in my filing cabinet.
The forged one with my signature.
I looked at the routing number at the bottom — a detail I'd registered earlier but not focused on.
I cross-referenced it against Daniel's documents.
The routing number appeared once before.
In an account opened four months before I had joined the company.
Before I had any connection to the holding group at all.
Whoever Harlan was, they had been building this before I existed in the picture.
Reeves hadn't invented the fraud.
He had inherited it.
And when Daniel got close, Reeves had done what any loyal employee does — he had protected the person above him.
My phone buzzed on the desk.
A text from a number I didn't recognize.
*You cancelled Chicago.
That was a mistake.
We should talk before this gets complicated.*
I read it twice.
Then I took a photograph of the screen and sent it to Grace.
Her reply came back in under three minutes, which told me she hadn't been sleeping either.
*Don't respond.
Forward to me.
I know who this is.*
I typed back: *Reeves?*
Her reply: *No.
Keep the phone on.
I'll call you at seven.*
I set the phone down.
The house was completely silent.
Outside, the guest cottage light was still on.
At two in the morning, I walked to the window and looked out at it.
The shadow behind the curtain was still there.
Not moving.
May you like
Just present.
Wendy wasn't sleeping either.
