"I'm not— " He stops. Starts again. "When it gets bad, I go somewhere. I've always done it. It's the only way I know how to hold things together."
"I know that too."
"I'll work on it."
"I'm not asking you to be different," I say. "I'm asking you to let me in when you go there. That's all."
He's quiet for a moment. The clock in the hallway marks the hour.
"Okay," he says.
It’s not a promise exactly. But he’s trying.
I put my head back on his shoulder.
Tomorrow the phone will go off before seven and we'll be two people moving carefully through the same space again.
But tonight, he's here. All the way here.
For now, that's enough.
18
PHOENIX
The deposition request is sitting in the middle of my desk when I get in at seven-thirty, which means someone put it there after I left last night. My assistant has a key and specific instructions about what goes in the center of the desk versus the inbox, versus the credenza, and the center of the desk means she read it and made a judgment call that I'd want to see it first thing.
She was right.
I'm still in my jacket when I pick it up. Formal letterhead, a regulatory body I've been dealing with for four months, my name at the top with the full legal version of it—Phoenix James Crawford—which they only use when they want you to know they've done their homework. I read it standing up because sitting down would mean settling in and I'm not ready for that.
Standard language. Bureaucratic tone. The kind of document engineered to read like routine while meaning anything but. They want me to appear and answer questions about Crawford Group's offshore partnership structures, specifically the entities established between 2008 and 2014, specifically the ones with connections to Pacific Basin investments. I know which entities they mean. Richard has beenfeeding the regulators for four years and he's gotten better at it. The early filings were vague, designed to open a file rather than build a case. This one is specific. Someone has been doing real work.
I set it face-down on the corner of my desk.
It joins the pile. That's what I call it in my head now—the pile—because that's what it's become, a physical accumulation of everything Richard has been sending through official channels over the last two months. Deposition requests, regulatory inquiries, the anonymous tips to investors that Nathan traces back to shell companies two layers removed from Richard's actual network. Form letters from law firms I've never heard of asking questions they already know the answers to. The pile is six inches thick and growing.
The work is the only thing I can control right now. The pile is Richard. The cascade analysis, the Schedule C provision, the two board members Nathan has been cultivating for three weeks are mine. I keep the two separate. I go back to work.
Three hours later my investigator sends me a file.
I've had people running the full scope of Richard's connections for six weeks — every entity, every document, every name that appears more than once in his network. Most of what comes back is financial infrastructure, shell companies, the architecture of a man who spent thirty years making himself invisible. Occasionally a name surfaces that requires a second look. People who wandered into Richard's orbit without knowing what they were walking into.
James Dupree's name is in the file.
I read it twice. Then I close my office door and sit down and read it a third time.
The original connection is clean. It was a business arrangement, a passive investment vehicle, the kind of thing a man makes on the advice of a financial planner without lookingtoo hard at the underlying structures. James came into contact with one of Richard's entities years ago through a fund that had no obvious fingerprints on it. Innocently. I spend twenty minutes pulling the thread backward, making sure I'm not constructing something that isn't there. I'm not. James didn't seek this out. He didn't know.
Then I check the timestamp on when he found out.
James discovered the connection two years ago. His own financial advisor flagged it. It came through a routine audit, a question about the underlying partnership, someone doing their job. James found out that his money was entangled with the man responsible for Ashley Price's death and he said nothing to my father.
He came to the BBQ. He brought a six-pack of craft beer. He drank lemonade and ate at the table and asked about Jade's manuscript and looked at my father across the yard with that careful measuring expression I thought I'd misunderstood.
I hadn't misread it.
He came back for Sunday lunches. He laughed at something Olive said. He asked Jade follow-up questions about her book like a man who was genuinely interested, which maybe he was. Two things could be true at once. He could have been genuinely interested in Jade and sitting on a secret that implicates my father in a murder. Both things can be true simultaneously.
