Chapter 6: The Meeting
I called Martin from my own phone.
Emily stood beside me, close enough to hear both sides.
She had a small digital recorder — Roy Finch had driven it over at six in the morning, a quiet man in his sixties who shook my hand and said nothing unnecessary.
Martin answered on the third ring.
"I wondered how long it would take you." His voice was exactly as I remembered.
Unhurried.
Certain of itself.
"She came to you, then."
"She did," I said.
"I think you knew she would."
"I hoped.
It's more satisfying this way." A pause.
"How does she look?"
My jaw tightened.
Emily touched my arm once, lightly.
*Stay even.*
"She looks like someone who has been running for seven years," I said.
"Is that what you wanted?"
"What I wanted," Martin said, "was for you to spend seven years not knowing.
To wake up every morning and wonder.
To sit with that." Another pause.
"Did it work?"
"Yes."
"Good." He said it simply, without cruelty.
That was worse than cruelty.
"Then we're closer to even than we were."
"I want to meet," I said.
"Face to face.
I think we both know this doesn't end with a text message."
Silence.
Long enough that I thought he might refuse.
"The park on Alderton Road," he said.
"Tomorrow.
Eleven o'clock.
Come alone.
If I see your daughter, I walk away and the next contact you receive will not be from me directly."
"I'll be there."
He ended the call.
Roy Finch was in the kitchen doorway.
He had heard enough.
"The recorder will pick up at that distance if you keep your phone in your breast pocket," he said.
"Don't hold it.
Don't check it.
Just let it run."
"What exactly do we need him to say?"
"The threat he made to Emily.
In his own words.
Ideally with enough context that it can't be explained away." Finch looked at Emily.
"He's proud of what he did.
That's the weakness.
Proud people repeat themselves when they think they're safe."
Emily nodded slowly.
"He'll want Dad to know the full plan.
He's been waiting twenty-three years to explain it."
"Then let him explain it," Finch said.
"Don't interrupt.
Don't argue.
Let him talk."
The next morning was cold and bright.
I put on the coat I'd been wearing in the photograph Martin had shown Emily seven years ago.
I don't know exactly why.
Something about arriving as the man he remembered, the man he had been studying for decades, felt like the right choice.
The park was nearly empty at eleven.
A woman walking a dog in the far distance.
Two children on the swings with a grandmother watching from a bench.
Martin was already there, standing on the path beside the small ornamental pond.
He had put on weight and lost hair, but he stood the same way he always had — feet slightly apart, hands in his coat pockets, watching the approach.
"You look old," he said when I reached him.
"So do you."
He almost smiled.
"Sit down."
We sat on the bench nearest the pond.
The recorder was running in my breast pocket.
My heart was steady, which surprised me.
"Tell me what you want, Martin."
"I want you to sign the Alderton Road property over to Calloway Holdings." He said it the way a person states a fact they have rehearsed many times.
"You bought it the year after you dissolved our partnership using capital that came directly from the work we did together.
That property should have been half mine."
"That property was purchased with my personal funds after the partnership was legally dissolved."
"With money you would not have had without me." His voice didn't rise.
"I'm not asking.
I'm telling you what is going to happen.
You sign the property over, and this ends.
Emily goes back to her life.
You go back to yours."
"And if I don't?"
He turned and looked at me directly for the first time.
"Then I make sure everyone who matters to you learns exactly what kind of man you are.
I have documentation, real and constructed, that will be very difficult to disprove.
Your reputation.
Your friendships.
Your relationship with Emily." He paused.
"I've had twenty-three years to prepare, and I have been thorough."
I looked at the pond.
"I need time to consider it."
"You have forty-eight hours." He stood.
"I'm glad she came home, by the way.
I always intended for her to, eventually.
Once the lesson was complete." He buttoned his coat.
"Tell her I said that."
He walked away along the path without looking back.
I sat on the bench until he was out of sight.
Then I took the phone from my pocket and stopped the recording.
Roy Finch answered on the first ring.
"Did you get it?" I asked.
May you like
"Every word," he said.
"I'm calling my contact now."
