Chapter 6: The Brother
Portland was a four-hour drive.
Daniel left Marwick with Thomas Reed's file on the passenger seat — forty pages of documents, letters, and photocopied records that Thomas had been keeping in a locked cabinet for thirty-four years.
He drove without music.
He stopped once for gas and stood at the pump in the cold for longer than necessary, watching the numbers climb.
He found Michael Vance's address through the county records Thomas had included.
A small house on a residential street near a park.
A retired teacher's house — tidy, modest, with a vegetable garden that had been put to bed for winter and a basketball hoop in the driveway that had clearly been used recently.
Daniel sat outside for ten minutes.
Then he thought about Lily.
About frosting on her face and two hundred people watching and Claire's smile that didn't reach her eyes.
He got out of the car.
A man answered the door on the second knock.
Sixty-four, as Thomas had said.
Medium height, grey at the temples, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.
He was wearing a flannel shirt and holding a paperback with his thumb marking the page.
He looked at Daniel.
Daniel looked at him.
The jaw was the same.
The line of the nose.
The way the brow sat.
"Can I help you?" Michael said.
"My name is Daniel Stallone," Daniel said.
"I think we need to talk."
Michael's expression shifted — not recognition, but something adjacent to it.
A flicker of something he couldn't name.
"I don't know that name."
"I know.
That's the problem." Daniel held up the file.
"Can I come in?
This is going to take a while."
Michael looked at the file.
Then at Daniel's face.
Then at the file again.
He stepped back and held the door open.
They sat at the kitchen table.
Michael made tea without asking and set a cup in front of Daniel, which struck Daniel as the gesture of a man who had spent decades being kind to people he'd just met.
Daniel laid out the documents one at a time.
He didn't narrate.
He let Michael read.
It took twenty minutes.
Michael read slowly and carefully, the way a man reads something he is trying to find the error in.
He didn't find the error.
When he set the last page down, he took off his reading glasses and placed them on the table.
He looked at the window for a long moment.
"My mother told me my father d*ed in a car accident," Michael said.
"Before I was born."
"I know."
"She never lied to me.
About anything else." His voice was even.
Careful.
"She was the most honest person I've ever known."
"She believed it," Daniel said.
"Thomas Reed — the attorney who handled the original arrangement — he thinks she was told enough of a version of the truth that she eventually stopped questioning it.
She was twenty-three.
She was alone.
She took the money and she left and she built a life."
Michael was quiet.
"I'm not here to take anything from you," Daniel said.
"I want you to understand that.
I'm here because there are people who are going to come to your door in four days with a document they want you to sign.
And if you sign it without knowing what it is, you'll be releasing a legal claim you didn't know you had."
Michael turned from the window.
"What kind of claim?"
"To the Stallone estate.
Land holdings, primarily.
The value is—" Daniel paused.
"Significant."
"I don't want money."
"I know.
But they don't know that.
And they're not giving you the choice to decide."
Michael looked at the documents again.
His hand moved toward them, then stopped.
"You drove four hours to warn me," he said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
Daniel thought about it honestly.
"Because what they did to my daughter was a distraction.
And what they're planning to do to you is worse.
And I'm tired of my family being used as a weapon by people who think the rest of us won't notice."
Michael picked up his tea.
He held it in both hands without drinking.
"I have a daughter," he said.
"Ruth.
She's thirty-one."
"Thomas mentioned her."
"She looks like—" Michael stopped.
He looked at Daniel.
"She looks like the photograph in that file.
The one of your father as a young man."
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
"What do you need from me?" Michael said finally.
"I need you not to sign anything on Thursday," Daniel said.
"And I need you to meet someone.
Thomas Reed.
He's been holding these documents for thirty-four years waiting for the right moment to use them."
Michael set down his tea.
"And is this the right moment?"
Daniel thought of Derek's card.
The handwritten address.
The four words at the bottom.
*Michael knows about Lily.*
"Someone wanted me to think you were a threat," Daniel said.
"That tells me they're scared of what happens if we're in the same room together."
Michael looked at him for a long moment.
May you like
"All right," he said.
"Tell me what you need."
