Chapter 10: What the Cottage Kept
Three weeks later, on a Saturday that had once been marked in a Newport venue's calendar as a wedding date, Dominic Mercer drove to Providence.
He met with a detective named Carver who had spent the previous two weeks pulling financial records, cross-referencing partnership filings, and locating a former employee of Devereux's who had left the company abruptly eighteen months earlier.
The employee's name was Sandra Oates.
She was fifty-three, recently remarried, and had no particular reason to protect anyone.
She sat across from Dominic in a conference room and told him what she knew.
Devereux had been approached by Griffin Harrington in the spring of two years ago.
The approach was framed as a business opportunity — a chance to exit a struggling partnership cleanly and redirect capital toward a more promising venture that Harrington Capital was structuring.
The exit from Marcus Webb's project was coordinated.
The timing was chosen to maximize the damage to Marcus's personal guarantees.
"Did Devereux know what it would do to Marcus Webb?" Dominic asked.
Sandra Oates looked at her hands.
"He knew Marcus would lose the project," she said.
"I don't think he knew — I don't think either of them knew — that Marcus would—" She stopped.
"Marcus Webb d\*ed of a heart attack four months after the collapse.
He was forty-one."
The conference room was very quiet.
"Stress," Carver said carefully.
"The medical examiner's report cited contributing factors."
"Yes," Sandra said.
"I read it.
After I left the company." She looked at Dominic.
"I left because I found the correspondence between Devereux and Harrington.
I didn't know what to do with it.
I didn't think anyone would—" She stopped again.
"I kept copies."
She placed a USB drive on the table.
Dominic looked at it.
Then he looked at Carver.
"How long?" he asked.
"For a formal investigation?
Months.
Possibly longer." Carver leaned back.
"But the civil case — the wrongful interference with the Webb partnership — that moves faster.
And with this—" He nodded at the drive.
"Natalie Webb has standing to file."
Dominic picked up the drive.
He thought about Marcus Webb, whom he had met exactly four times and found to be a quiet, careful man who loved his wife and was very proud of his son and had once spent an entire dinner talking about a book he was reading about the history of lighthouses.
He thought about Noah asking why Brooke said Grandma Catherine's house belonged to her now.
He thought about Natalie arriving six months ago with two suitcases.
"Get me the name of the best civil attorney in Providence," he said.
Carver wrote a name on a card and slid it across the table.
Dominic drove back to Newport in the early afternoon.
He stopped at the cottage before going to the main house.
Natalie was in the garden — the small one on the cottage's south side that Catherine had planted and that Natalie had quietly begun tending over the past weeks.
She was on her knees in the dirt, doing something careful with a trowel.
She looked up when she heard him.
"You went to Providence," she said.
"Yes."
She read his face.
"Tell me."
He sat on the low garden wall and told her everything.
Sandra Oates.
The correspondence.
The drive.
The timeline.
He told her all of it, clearly and without softening it, because she was not a person who needed to be protected from the truth about her own life.
When he finished, Natalie was quiet for a long time.
She was still holding the trowel.
A small amount of dirt fell from it onto the garden path.
"Griffin Harrington arranged for Devereux to destroy Marcus's company," she said.
"Yes."
"While Brooke was getting close to you."
"Yes."
"They were going to take the estate from both sides." She looked at the trowel.
"The business from Marcus.
The trust from you."
"That's what the correspondence suggests."
Another silence.
"Marcus worked so hard," she said.
"He was so careful.
He checked everything twice.
He never—" She stopped.
Her jaw was tight.
"He never knew it wasn't his fault."
"No," Dominic said.
"He didn't."
Natalie set the trowel down on the garden wall beside him.
"I want to file," she said.
"I know."
"I want there to be a record.
I want it to be official and documented and I want Griffin Harrington to have to sit in a room and answer for it."
"I have a name for you." He held out Carver's card.
She took it and looked at it.
"Will it work?"
"I don't know," he said honestly.
"But it will be real.
And it will be on record.
And he will have to answer."
Natalie closed her hand around the card.
From inside the cottage came Noah's voice, calling for her — something about the deep-sea fish book, a question about whether anglerfish were real or made up.
Natalie looked toward the cottage window.
"Real," she called back.
"Very real.
I'll show you a picture in a minute."
She looked at Dominic.
"Thank you," she said.
"For coming home."
He looked at the garden — at the plants Catherine had put in the ground years ago, still growing, still returning each season without being asked.
"I should have come home sooner," he said.
"You came when Noah called." She picked up the trowel again.
"That's enough."
Inside the cottage, Noah was still asking questions.
Outside, the afternoon light moved across the garden in the slow, unhurried way of late-season sun that has nowhere particular to be.
Dominic sat on the wall for a while longer.
He didn't go inside immediately.
He just sat, in the garden his mother had planted, beside his sister who was putting things back in the ground, and let the afternoon be what it was.
---
*Some people spend years building a life that was never meant to be theirs — and some families spend years not seeing what's happening right in front of them.
But when the truth finally comes out, it changes everything.*
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