Chapter 3: What Daniel Knew
Victoria's thumb hovered over the screen.
"I said don't answer it," Daniel repeated.
"It's just a friend—"
"It's not a friend." He took one step toward her.
"Put it face-down on the wall and step away from it."
She didn't move.
I looked between them.
The air had changed — shifted from the humiliation of five minutes ago into something older and more private.
Something that had nothing to do with me standing there in wet clothes.
"Daniel," I said carefully.
"What's going on?"
He didn't look at me.
His eyes stayed on his wife.
"Victoria," he said.
"I'm going to ask you one time.
Who is Garrett Moss?"
The name landed like a stone dropped into still water.
Victoria's chin came up.
"He's a colleague."
"He's called you eleven times in the last two weeks."
"We're working on a project—"
"You don't work." His voice was still quiet.
That was the thing about Daniel — he had never been a man who shouted.
He got quieter the angrier he became.
"You haven't worked in four years.
Not since I asked you to stop so we could start a family."
Victoria's jaw tightened.
"That's not fair."
"Which part?"
She said nothing.
I looked down at my hands.
The mud from the bucket had dried in the creases of my knuckles.
I thought about leaving.
Giving them the driveway back.
But something kept my feet where they were — some instinct that said this moment mattered.
That I needed to hear it.
"Clara." Daniel turned to me then.
His face was tired in a way I hadn't seen since our father's funeral.
"How much do you know about the Hargrove account?"
The name stopped me cold.
The Hargrove account was one of three legacy sub-trusts inside the main family trust.
Our grandfather had set it up separately.
It held roughly four million dollars in restricted assets — property bonds, a small private equity stake, and the deed to a storage facility in Connecticut that nobody had touched in twenty years.
"I know everything about it," I said slowly.
"Why?"
"Because three months ago," Daniel said, "someone submitted a request to liquidate it."
My stomach dropped.
"That request," he continued, "came from an email address registered to my office.
But I didn't send it."
Victoria turned toward the garden wall.
Her back was to us now.
"The request was flagged by the trust's legal administrator," Daniel said.
"She called me directly.
I told her to hold everything and not to tell anyone.
Not even you.
Not until I understood what I was dealing with."
I stared at him.
"You should have called me the moment it was flagged."
"I know."
"Daniel—"
"I know, Clara." He pressed two fingers to his forehead.
"I was trying to handle it quietly.
I thought I could find out who sent it without—" He stopped.
"Without what?"
He looked at Victoria's back.
She hadn't moved.
Hadn't turned around.
"Without it becoming what it's becoming," he said.
I walked to the garden wall.
I picked up my pruning shears.
I set them in my canvas bag.
I needed something to do with my hands because what I actually wanted to do was sit down on the front step and put my head in them.
Four million dollars.
A forged request.
An email from Daniel's office that Daniel didn't send.
And a man named Garrett Moss calling Victoria eleven times.
"Victoria," I said.
She turned.
Her eyes were dry.
That was the thing I noticed first.
No tears.
No trembling chin.
The performance from five minutes ago — the one she'd put on for Daniel at the window — was completely gone.
What was left was something harder.
"I want a lawyer," she said.
Daniel blinked.
"What?"
"I'm not saying anything else without a lawyer present." She looked directly at me.
"And I want you off this property."
I looked at her for a long moment.
"This property," I said, "is held in trust under my name and my brother's jointly.
You have no legal standing to remove me from it."
Her eyes didn't waver.
"Then we have nothing to talk about," she said.
She picked up her phone from the wall, turned, and walked through the front door.
The door didn't slam.
That was almost worse.
Daniel stood in the driveway with his hands at his sides, watching the space where his wife had been.
The neighbor across the street had finally walked on.
The street was empty now.
Just the two of us, the muddy front step, and the sound of a car alarm going off somewhere down the road.
"How long have you known?" I asked.
He was quiet for a moment.
"Six weeks," he said.
Six weeks.
While I'd been coming here every Sunday.
Watering his garden.
Checking his house.
While he'd been sitting on information that could have dismantled the entire trust.
"Come inside," I said.
"And tell me everything."
He nodded.
But he didn't move right away.
He was staring at the front door.
May you like
And I realized, watching him, that my brother wasn't just afraid of what Victoria had done.
He was afraid of what else I was about to find out.
