“Okay… can you check again?”
Another pause.
“Right. Thank you.”
She hung up slowly, looking back at me.
“They don’t have anything under her name,” she said.
That didn’t make sense.
“Well, if I remember correctly,” I thought out loud, leaning against the filing cabinet, “when her and Dillon moved, she opened a new account and joined that with Dillon when they got married. Both their salaries went to it.”
Rory tilted her head slightly.
“Okay,” she said. “So if she wasn’t working here still… why was she getting paid?”
I looked down at the file in her hand.
“She had shares in the company,” I said. “Same as you.”
Her eyes shifted just a little. “Same as me, huh.”
Something clicked in her mind.
She looked back down at her phone, already dialing again.
I watched her carefully now. She waited for the line to connect, then?—
“Hi, yes,” she said. “I just called a moment ago. I need you to check something else for me. Is there an account under the name Aurora Rodriguez?”
What the fuck…
Her grip on the phone tightened.
“…yes,” she said slowly. “I can hold.”
She looked at me and pulled the phone slightly away from her ear.
“You said when they got married, she opened a new account with my dad,” she started.
“Yeah,” I said. “Everything went there after that. Salary, expenses, all of it.”
She nodded.
“But that doesn’t meanshe closed the old one,” she added.
I frowned slightly.
She shifted her weight, already moving again, pacing slow in front of me while she held the phone to her ear.
“Think about it,” she said. “She’s about to have me. She’s moving her life, merging finances, starting something new. That’s a major transition point.”
She turned, facing me fully now.
“And you didn’t terminate her employee file,” she said.
“I told you. I couldn’t.”
