Chapter 5: The Blue Folder
I was back at the house by five in the morning.
The lights in the living room were still on.
Mother was seated at the dining table with a cup of tea she wasn't drinking.
Marcus was on the sofa, jacket still on, like a man who had been ready to leave for hours but hadn't worked out where to go.
Neither of them spoke when I walked in.
I went directly to the bedroom Elena and I had shared before my deployment.
The top drawer of the dresser was open.
The blue folder was gone.
I stood at the open drawer for a moment.
Then I turned around and walked back to the dining room.
"Where is it?" I said.
Mother looked up from her tea.
"Where is what?"
"The blue folder.
The inheritance documents.
Elena's copies."
"I haven't been in your room."
"Marcus."
He didn't look at me.
"Marcus, I'm going to ask you one time."
He picked at a thread on his jacket sleeve.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
I pulled out my phone and set it on the table between them.
On the screen was a document Raymond had sent — a scanned copy of the beneficiary redirection request, with my forged signature at the bottom.
Mother looked at it.
Her expression didn't change.
"Someone submitted this to the estate account two weeks ago," I said.
"They used my name.
My signature.
While I was in the UAE."
"Forgeries happen," Mother said.
"That has nothing to do with us."
"The IP address the request was submitted from belongs to this house."
That landed.
Marcus looked up for the first time.
"That's not—" he started.
"Marcus." Mother's voice was a blade.
He stopped.
I leaned forward, both hands on the table.
"Here is what I know.
Elena was sedated with a high-dose compound administered without medical supervision.
Her phone was taken and switched off.
The inheritance documents are missing.
And someone in this house attempted to forge my signature to redirect a financial account worth four hundred thousand pounds — an account my grandfather set up specifically for Elena and our child."
Silence.
"Here is what I also know," I continued.
"I have a recording of this house from the moment I arrived.
I have photographs of the guest bedroom.
I have financial records from a private investigator who has been documenting this for six weeks.
And I have a physician at the hospital who has already noted the irregularity of Elena's condition in his official records."
Mother set her teacup down very slowly.
"You're going to destroy this family," she said.
"You did that.
I'm just making sure there's a record of it."
"Everything I did was for this family.
For you.
That woman—"
"Her name is Elena."
"—was going to take everything your grandfather built and walk away with it.
She had you wrapped around her finger from the moment you met her.
Your grandfather too, God help him.
He changed his will six months before he d*ed, Daniel.
Six months.
After thirty years of this family building everything he had."
"He changed it because he wanted to.
Because Elena was carrying his great-grandchild.
Because he trusted her."
"He was old and she was clever."
I straightened up.
"Where is the folder, Mother?"
She held my gaze for a long moment.
Then she looked away — toward the window, toward the early grey light beginning to show at the edges of the curtains.
"In the study," she said finally.
"In the bottom drawer of the desk.
I was keeping it safe."
"You were keeping it hidden."
She didn't answer.
I went to the study.
The folder was there, exactly where she said — beneath a stack of old household bills, as if it had simply been misfiled.
I checked every page.
Nothing was missing.
Nothing had been altered.
I tucked it under my arm and came back to the doorway.
"I'm going back to the hospital," I said.
"When I return, I'll have a solicitor with me.
I'd recommend you both think carefully about what you want to say to them."
Marcus finally spoke.
His voice was very quiet.
"Daniel.
I didn't know she was going to use that much.
I thought it was just enough to make her sleep through the night.
I didn't know it would—" He stopped.
"I didn't know."
The room went very still.
Mother turned and looked at Marcus with an expression I had never seen on her face before.
Not anger.
May you like
Something colder than anger.
He had just said the one thing she had told him never to say.
