Chapter 5 Norah
NORAH
The morning after Marshall’s visit felt ordinary on the surface, but Norah couldn’t shake the tightness in her chest.
Summit Capital operated on the twenty-fourth through twenty-seventh floors of the Pinnacle building.
The twenty-sixth was already buzzing when she slipped into her glass-walled office.
Phones were ringing, analysts were hunched over terminals, and the printer across the bullpen was spitting out sheets with mechanical indifference.
All the noise should have steadied her. Instead, Marshall’s voice slid into her mind like an unwelcome echo.
This is not an inconsistency. It’s a fuse.
She shoved the memory away.
Walk away, Norah. She clenched her jaw. Irritatingly, it wasn’t the words that stuck with her. It was the way he’d said her name. Like he still had any right to care.
Shaking it off, she pulled her chair in and woke up her computer. Numbers would clear her head. They always did.
She opened the NorthBridge Energy file again, her pulse ticking a little faster than she wanted to admit. Columns filled the screen in neat order. Everything looked normal, the same as it had yesterday and the day before. And every day she had pulled the file out to dig again.
She ran the macro anyway. Winslow_QC_v7.xlsm churned through the data with the efficiency she’d coded into it years ago. Bars appeared, the histogram climbing.
Her pen hovered.
The slope was wrong. Again.
Relief and dread tangled in her gut. Relief because she hadn’t imagined it the other night, or the other six times she’d run it since. Dread because that meant she still wasn’t chasing shadows. She was staring at something real.
She hit Ctrl+S and directed it to her secure drive.
Error: Operation not permitted.
Her brows knit. That had never happened before. She tried again, saving to a thumb drive she kept for backups.
Access denied.
Her stomach dropped. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. If permissions were changed, that meant someone else had been in the files. Maybe it was an IT sweep. Maybe it was . . .
She clicked “Print.” The dialogue box hung longer than it should have, then blinked out. No hum of the machine. Nothing.
“What—” She muttered under her breath.
Norah highlighted the output and tried copying it into a new workbook. Nothing.
Fine. If they blocked downloads, she’d go old-school. She opened the tab she still had cached, scrolled slowly, and began taking screenshots. She moved methodically, her breath shallow. She dragged them into a folder labeled innocuously — “Q2 Slides” — then opened her cloud sync.
For a beat, the progress bar crawled. Then it stopped dead. Failed to upload.
Norah leaned back in her chair, pulse hammering now. Someone or something was blocking her.
She rebooted, jaw tight. The Summit logo pulsed across her screen, then her desktop reloaded. She opened the NorthBridge file again and ran the macro.
The histogram loaded . . . perfect. A textbook slope.
No jagged skyline. No missing ones. No clumped nines.
Gone.
Her chair creaked as she leaned forward, staring at the smooth, placid results. “No,” she whispered. She flipped between tabs, widened the ranges, pulled raw exports. Every view showed the same thing—nothing.
She refreshed. Still normal. She opened another ledger. Normal. All of it.
Her mouth went dry. Someone hadn’t just cut off her access—they’d rewritten all the data.
Her mind slipped back to the fact that Marshall had been here yesterday. And after he’d been at Summit, the data had changed. Why had he been so adamant that she back off? Was he involved in the cover up? What other motive could he have for her to stay away?
Everything she knew about Marshall Kelley rebelled against the thought. She’d never met someone as principled and duty-bound as him. That was, after all, what had ended their relationship. But that was fifteen years ago. People changed.
Had Marshall changed that much?
She pressed her palms to the desk, trying to slow the tumble of thoughts. Richard Hale would know. He always knew. He’d vouch for her.
He’d fix it.
She shut her laptop and stood. The view from her window of the Potomac blurred at the edges. She adjusted her blazer, grabbed her notebook, and went to find him. She trusted Richard.
It wasn’t just professional respect. Richard had stepped into a place she hadn’t even realized was hollow.
Her father had been gone before she was old enough to know him, and the men who followed never lasted long enough to be trusted.
That kind of absence left a mark—an instinct not to lean on anyone because they were bound to leave.
But Richard was different. He didn’t vanish.
He showed up in meetings and late-night reviews.
And in the small things. He treated her like a person, not just an employee.
His office occupied the southeast corner, the best light on the floor. Inside, the bookshelves were lined with framed photos of charity galas and conference panels, a subtle trophy case of connections.
“Knock, knock.” She tapped on the doorframe as she said the words.
His head snapped up. Richard Hale sat at his desk, tie a little crooked, his coffee mug balanced in one hand, his phone in the other. He was in his fifties, sharp-witted, and just rumpled enough to seem approachable in a building full of polished glass men.
Norah exhaled, forcing composure. “Morning, boss.”
“Morning?” He set the mug down on the corner of his desk, checking his watch. “It’s almost two, Winslow. When was the last time you went home at a reasonable hour?”
She managed a half-smile. “Define reasonable.”
“Before the cleaning crew starts vacuuming.” His grin softened the rebuke. “You work too hard. You can’t neglect Cleo.”
She chuckled. Somehow he always remembered the little details. She swore she hadn’t mentioned her cat more than once.
“Comes with the job. And Cleo will forgive me for the low price of some extra treats.” She hesitated, then settled into a chair. “Actually . . . I wanted to ask you about something in the NorthBridge portfolio.”
Richard’s expression didn’t waver. “Sure, what’s up?”
She walked him through the variance she’d seen. She explained the histogram that didn’t align, and the fact that it had since . . . smoothed out.
He listened, nodding slowly, sipping his coffee.
When she finished, he leaned back. “Acquisitions like NorthBridge are messy. Always have been. Mid-sized firms in growth mode usually are. Did I ever tell you about the Beringer acquisition, fifteen years ago?”
She shook her head.
“Same thing,” he said. “One quarter their numbers looked like spaghetti. Three months later it all balanced once the consolidation finished. Accounting quirks. Timing lags. You’ll see it a dozen times in your career.
I’m sure we just got an updated version of their data after some bookkeeping was finalized. ”
His tone was calm, reasonable. The kind of reassurance she’d leaned on since he’d first taken her under his wing.
“But—” she started.
He held up a hand. “Norah, you’re sharp. The best analyst on this floor. If your gut says something’s wrong, we’ll dig deeper. But sometimes? Sometimes the gut is just ahead of the facts. Give it a little air.”
She looked at him, searching for any flicker of suspicion or dismissal. But all she saw was Richard, steady and kind. The man who had vouched for her when she was a nobody with a secondhand suit and a scholarship résumé.
Her chest eased fractionally. If Richard wasn’t worried, maybe she was overreacting. Maybe Marshall’s warning had just gotten under her skin.
Hale wasn’t family, not exactly, but he was the closest thing she’d had to a father figure in a city where loyalty usually came with an invoice attached.
Richard never made her feel like she owed him for his belief in her.
He gave it freely. And so, trusting him became a reflex, almost like breathing—because if she didn’t trust him, then she’d have to admit she was on her own.
And she wasn’t ready to go back to that.
Richard rose, taking his mug. “Trust your instincts. That’s why I trust you. I’ve got a meeting, but we can talk more later.”
And just like that, he was gone. Leaving her alone in his office. Another subtle sign that he trusted her.
Norah went back to her office and stared at her screen again. The neat columns glowed back at her, blank-faced, innocent.
This is not an inconsistency. It’s a fuse.
She pressed her palms against her eyes. She hated that Marshall’s words had more staying power than Richard’s reassurance. Richard was the one she should be leaning on. Richard was right here, the proof of integrity she wanted to believe in.
Still, the memory clung. The way Marshall had leaned across her desk, his eyes hard.
The way he’d said her name like he was still allowed to.
She told herself the irritation she felt was because he thought he could still control her.
That was the only explanation. Not the flicker of something else she didn’t want to name.
Unlike Marshall, Richard hadn’t warned her away. “Trust your gut,” she whispered under her breath. That’s what Richard had said. And that was exactly what she was going to do.
Norah opened the “Q4 Slides” folder and checked the screenshots again. Still there. Proof she hadn’t imagined it.
She zipped them, renamed the file “Marketing Review,” and tried the cloud sync again. This time, the progress bar moved. She held her breath until the green check appeared.
But as the confirmation faded, a new pop-up blinked in the corner of her screen. A system notice: Session activity monitored.
Her mouse stilled.
She hadn’t triggered that. She had never seen that alert before. And just as quickly as it appeared, it vanished.
Norah’s pulse skittered. Someone had been watching.
She shut the folder and closed her eyes for a beat.
Richard believed in her. And Richard would never let Summit be involved in something dirty. She’d prove it for him—prove that Summit wasn’t compromised. If anyone was dangerous, it was NorthBridge.
Richard’s trust had to count for something.
Numbers didn’t lie.
But people did.
And if Marshall thought he could scare her out of following this trail, he was wrong.
She straightened her blazer, pulled the NorthBridge file open again, and started from the top.