I never told my stepmother I owned the airline.

Harland Peck's office was on the sixth floor of a building in the City, the kind of address that had been expensive for forty years and intended to stay that way.

I arrived at nine the next morning with Diane and a solicitor named Ruth Calloway, who had been working with me for three weeks and who carried a leather briefcase that she set on Harland's conference table without being invited to sit down.

Harland was already there.

He had known we were coming — I had sent a formal notice the previous evening.

He sat at the head of the table in a dark suit, silver-haired, composed, with the particular stillness of a man who had spent decades being the most dangerous person in any room he entered.

He looked at Ruth.

Then at Diane.

Then at me.

"Alex," he said.

"I was sorry to hear about your father.

He was a remarkable man."

"He was," I said.

"Sit down, Ruth."

Ruth sat.

Diane sat.

I remained standing.

"We'll keep this straightforward," I said.

"The probate court has reopened my father's estate on grounds of fraud.

A forensic document examiner has confirmed that the trust amendment dated the fourteenth of March was backdated — the notary stamp was applied after the document was signed, using ink of a measurably different age.

The original amendment your office witnessed and filed is the subject of a formal fraud investigation."

Harland's expression did not change.

"Those are serious allegations," he said.

"They are facts," Ruth said.

She opened the briefcase and placed a document on the table.

"This is the examiner's report.

This — " a second document — "is the court order reinstating the prior trust structure pending the outcome of the investigation.

And this — " a third — "is a copy of the email correspondence between your office and Victoria Vance over the past eleven months, which we have already submitted to the Solicitors Regulation Authority."

Harland looked at the three documents on the table.

He did not touch them.

"I'd like to call my counsel," he said.

"You're welcome to," I said.

"But before you do, I want to give you one opportunity to cooperate fully with the investigation.

If you do, that cooperation will be noted.

If you don't — " I paused — "the SRA referral has already been made.

The fraud investigation is already open.

The accounts at Meridian Slate have been frozen by court order as of this morning.

What happens next depends entirely on what you decide in the next few minutes."

For the first time, something moved behind Harland's eyes.

"The accounts are frozen?" he said.

"Since seven forty-five this morning."

He was quiet.

His hands, flat on the table, were very still.

"Victoria told me the transfer was legitimate," he said finally.

"She told me your father had authorized it verbally.

That the paperwork was a formality."

"And the backdating?"

A long pause.

"I was told the notary had made a clerical error on the original date.

That it was being corrected."

"By whom?"

He looked at me.

"Victoria," he said.

"It was always Victoria."

Ruth was already writing.

Harland reached for the documents on the table and pulled them toward him slowly, like a man accepting something he had been trying to avoid for a long time.

"I'll cooperate," he said.

"Fully."

I picked up my phone and sent a single message to Diane: *He's in.*

Then I looked at Harland Peck — nineteen years of Victoria's trusted counsel, the man who had filed the document that stripped me of everything my father had built — and I felt nothing that resembled satisfaction.

Not yet.

Victoria was still out there.