Chapter Two #2
Cole set the wrench down slow and gave Walt his full attention, because a duplicate charge on its own could be nothing, a clerical error, a vendor system glitch, the kind of thing that happened to every small business eventually.
But Walt hadn't walked out to the garage bay over nothing, and Walt's face had the particular set to it that meant he already suspected the answer and didn't like it.
"Three people had access," Cole repeated. "Me, Rowan, and."
He didn't finish it. He didn't have to. Walt just watched him get there on his own, which was, Cole understood, exactly why Walt had come out here instead of sending Preacher, because some conversations a president owed a man to have himself.
"I want you to look at it," Walt said. "Not because I'm handing you her business back.
Because you're the only one who remembers the login credentials we set up for that vendor portal two years ago, and if this traces where I think it traces, Rowan needs the truth fast, not slow, and she needs it from someone who can actually read what the account activity says instead of guessing. "
"She's not going to want it from me."
"She's not going to want it at all. That's different from what she needs.
" Walt straightened off the doorframe. "This isn't me putting you back on her payroll, Cole.
This is me telling you there's a problem with a name attached to it, and you're the man in this club best equipped to confirm whose name that is before it becomes a bigger problem than a duplicate invoice. "
Cole set the wrench down and wiped his palms slow, buying himself a second before he answered. "You know I told you I wasn't going near anything of hers."
"I know what you told me, and I respected it, because it was the right call seven months ago and it's still the right call for the parts of her business that don't have a security hole in them.
" Walt's voice didn't rise, it never did, but there was a weight under it Cole had learned to take seriously over four years of standing next to the man at church.
"This isn't me handing you a way back in, son.
Don't mistake it for one. This is a problem that happens to need the one set of hands in this club that built the door in the first place.
Once it's fixed, you go right back to standing outside it.
I'll make sure of that myself if you can't."
It landed the way Walt meant it to land, plain and unflattering, and Cole let it sit there without arguing, because arguing would have meant pretending he had some claim to being handled gently, and he'd used up whatever claim to that he'd ever had.
There'd been a time, not so long ago, when a conversation like this one would have ended with Walt clapping him on the shoulder and calling him the next man to sit at the head of that table.
Nobody had said the word succession out loud in seven months.
Cole had noticed the absence the way you noticed a missing tooth, tongue finding the gap again and again out of habit.
"Fine," Cole said. "I'll look at it. Once. And then Preacher takes it back over, and I'm out of it again."
Cole wiped his hands on the shop rag hanging off his belt and followed Walt into the small office at the back of the garage, the one with the ancient desktop computer Cole had set up himself back when the Yard was still a set of blueprints and a business loan application, back when helping Rowan build something had felt like the easiest, most natural thing in the world instead of a debt he was still working to pay down one restrained gesture at a time.
The vendor portal login screen came up the way it always had, plain and unglamorous, a piece of software nobody had thought twice about in two years because nobody had needed to.
Cole typed in the master credentials from memory, the same ones he'd set up back when there'd been three names on the account and no reason to think any of them would ever need watching.
He remembered setting up Vanessa's access, if he was being honest with himself, which he'd made a point of being for the last seven months even when it cost him.
It had been a small thing at the time, an afternoon of paperwork, Rowan asking him to walk the new bartender through the vendor ordering system so she could handle restocks on nights Rowan wasn't there.
Cole had done it without a second thought, because that was how the three of them had worked back then, before he'd let it become something else entirely, and he'd created a username and a temporary password and told Vanessa to change it to something she'd remember, and then he'd never once thought about that access again until this exact moment, seven months and one lifetime later, staring at a login screen with his stomach in his throat.
Nobody had revoked it. Not Rowan, who'd had every reason to want Vanessa's name scrubbed from every system the Yard touched and likely assumed, reasonably, that firing her had handled it.
Not Cole, who should have known, more than anyone, that a door like that needed to be locked the same week it stopped being safe to leave open, and hadn't thought of it either, because he'd been too busy trying to survive his own wreckage to remember there was a second one sitting unattended in a piece of software nobody checked.
Access log. Three usernames listed, same as always. Two of them Cole recognized as his own and Rowan's, logged in on the dates and times he'd have expected, invoice approvals, standard business rhythm.
The third username hadn't logged a single access in seven months, right up until six weeks ago. And then twice more after that, each visit timed to a payment cycle, each one lining up exactly with the dates on the duplicate charge Walt had walked out to the garage bay to tell him about.
Cole sat very still and looked at the timestamp for longer than he needed to, because some part of him was still hoping, uselessly, that he'd misread it.
He hadn't.
VCruz02. Vanessa's old login. Never deactivated, because deactivating it would have meant someone remembering it existed, and in the wreckage of the last seven months, nobody, including Cole, who should have known better than anyone, had thought to go back and lock a door that should have been sealed the same week she left.
"Well?" Walt said, from the doorway, watching him with the flat, patient attention of a man who already suspected what he was about to hear.
Cole looked up from the screen and felt the particular cold drop in his chest that meant the day had just turned into something he was going to have to walk across the lot and hand to Rowan himself, whether either of them wanted him to be the one doing it or not.
Seven months of standing outside doorways, of keeping three careful feet between himself and anything that was hers, and now the one piece of the wreckage he hadn't accounted for had crawled back in through a door he'd built with his own hands and never thought to lock.
There was no version of walking this across the lot that didn't look, to her, like him showing up in her life again with bad news attached, and no way around doing it anyway, because she deserved to hear it today, from someone who could actually explain what the account activity meant, not tomorrow from a rumor filtered through half of Millhaven.
"It's Vanessa," he said, and made himself say the rest of it too, because a half-truth handed to Walt was still a half-truth, and he'd promised himself seven months ago he was done handing those out to anyone. "She's still got access. Somebody's been using it."