Chapter Five
Rowan
Rowan spent the morning finding reasons to be busy that had nothing to do with the two o'clock she'd circled on the calendar taped inside the office door, restocking napkins that didn't need restocking, running a second inventory count on liquor she'd counted Tuesday, anything that kept her hands moving and her mind one step ahead of the fact that in a few hours she was going to sit in a small room with Cole Reyes and watch him work through her private accounts at close range for the first time in seven months.
Jonas clocked her mood without her having to say a word about it, which was one of the things she liked about him, the way he'd learned to read a room without needing it explained to him first.
"You want me parked at the bar the whole time, or you want me finding reasons to walk past the office every ten minutes?" he asked, wiping down glasses that were already clean, his own version of busywork.
"Bar's fine. I don't need a chaperone, Jonas, I need somebody in earshot in case the CO2 lines decide to blow during the one hour I can't watch them."
"Sure." He didn't push, but he didn't quite let it go either.
"For what it's worth, whatever he did, the guy's been walking around here for seven months like somebody let the air out of him.
I'm not saying that's an excuse for anything.
Just saying it's not nothing, watching a man do that to himself for that long without anybody making him. "
"Nobody asked your opinion on it."
"Nope." He grinned, easy, unbothered by the flat correction. "Offered it anyway. That's kind of my whole thing."
She sent him back to the CO2 lines with an errand that didn't need running and went to check the office one more time before two, straightening a chair that didn't need straightening, and told herself, not for the first time that week, that watching Cole sit down at her office computer would feel like any other vendor meeting. It didn't.
The first working session was scheduled for Thursday afternoon, two to five, business hours, Jonas restocking the bar well ten feet away the entire time, exactly the way the terms said it would be, and Rowan had told herself all morning that watching Cole sit down at her office computer would feel like any other vendor meeting.
It didn't. It felt like handing someone a key to a room she'd spent seven months rebuilding the locks on, even knowing she'd written every clause of the terms herself, even knowing Jonas was closer than shouting distance the whole time.
Cole showed up at one fifty-eight, two minutes early, laptop bag over one shoulder, and didn't sit down until she told him to.
"Office or the bar?" he asked, standing just inside the loading dock door the way he always did now, like the building itself required an invitation past that specific line.
"Office. I want to see the screen while you work, not hear about it after.
" She led the way, aware of him behind her at a careful, deliberate distance, aware of the particular quiet of a building that used to hold easy conversation between them and now held only the sound of her own footsteps and his following a few feet back.
"Jonas is at the bar if either of us needs him for anything. Door stays open."
"Wasn't going to suggest otherwise."
She sat him at the desk and pulled a second chair around to the side, close enough to see the monitor, far enough that there was a clean foot of space between them that she'd measured with her eyes before she'd let herself sit down.
He noticed her noticing, she could tell, and didn't comment on it, which she appreciated more than she wanted to.
He worked the way he used to work on anything mechanical, methodical and unhurried, narrating as he went not because she'd asked him to but because, she realized about ten minutes in, he was making a point of it, walking her through every click instead of just clicking, turning what could have been a closed-door technical fix into something she could follow and verify in real time.
"I'm pulling the full access log first, everything back to when the account was created, not just the last six weeks.
" He glanced at her, checking, the way he hadn't used to check anything with her, back when checking would have felt unnecessary between two people who trusted each other's judgment without asking.
"That okay? It's going to take a few minutes to load. "
"That's fine."
"I want you seeing everything I'm seeing, in the order I'm seeing it. No summarizing after the fact." He said it plainly, not performing it, and went back to the screen. "You should be the one who decides what's worth flagging, not me deciding for you what you need to know."
It was such a small thing, technically, a man simply doing the work in front of her instead of behind a closed door and handing her conclusions afterward, and it landed harder than it should have, because the old Cole, the Cole from before, wouldn't have thought twice about doing exactly this kind of thing alone and telling her the short version later, not out of malice, just out of the easy confidence of a man who'd never had to prove he could be trusted with the details.
This Cole checked in on load times. This Cole asked before pulling seven months of history instead of assuming the ask was implied.
She watched the log populate, line after line of timestamps and IP addresses she didn't fully understand, and let him talk her through it, patient, unhurried, translating the technical shape of it into plain language without ever making her feel slow for needing the translation.
"Here." He pointed at a cluster of entries, all from the same window of days.
"This is the pattern I flagged for Walt.
Six-week gap, then three logins, each one timed right before a payment cycle closes.
That's not somebody poking around out of curiosity.
That's somebody who understands exactly how your accounts payable schedule works and is timing their moves around it. "
"Which means somebody who worked here long enough to learn the schedule."
"Which means Vanessa, most likely, or somebody she taught it to.
" He said her name plainly, no hitch in it, the way he'd been saying it since Wednesday's church meeting, and Rowan noted that too, filed it alongside the rest of the small, deliberate changes she'd been cataloging against her will for the last two days.
"I want to check the IP addresses next, see if they match anything we can trace to a physical location. "
"Do it."
He leaned in toward the keyboard and, for half a second, without seeming to think about it at all, reached over and turned the small desk fan a few degrees toward her, the way he used to do a hundred times without either of them noticing, back when the office had been too warm most afternoons and adjusting the fan toward whoever was sitting closest had just been a thing his hands did on autopilot.
He caught himself halfway through the motion, hand freezing, and pulled back like he'd touched something hot.
"Sorry. Habit." He didn't look at her. "Wasn't trying to."
"It's a fan, Cole. Not a crime scene." She said it dryer than she meant to, but something in her chest had gone tight and unfamiliar at the small, thoughtless kindness of it, the way a body could remember a person's habits long after the mind had decided to stop trusting them. "Finish the search."
He did, jaw a little tighter than before, and neither of them mentioned it again, and Rowan spent the next several minutes being furious at herself for how long the warmth of the small gesture lingered after the moment itself had already passed.
He did, and the second set of data took longer to load, long enough that the silence in the small office stretched past comfortable, and Rowan found herself watching the side of his face instead of the screen, the particular concentration he brought to a problem, the same look he used to wear leaning over a carburetor on a Sunday afternoon, and hated the small, traitorous warmth that moved through her at the familiarity of it, because familiarity wasn't the same as safety and she knew that better than almost anyone alive.
"Got something." He sat back slightly, angled the monitor so she could see clearly. "Two of the three IPs trace back to a residential connection in Coleraine. Third one's a public wifi network, a truck stop off the interstate."
"The same truck stop Preacher's been watching. The one the Vultures' guy has been hanging around."
"Same one." He didn't editorialize on it, let the fact sit there for her to draw her own line to, which she appreciated, because she'd spent enough of the last seven months being told what to think about things that used to be simple.
"Doesn't prove she's working with them directly.
Could be coincidence, could be she's just careless about where she logs in from. But it's not nothing."
Rowan sat with that a moment, the particular vertigo of watching a personal betrayal reveal itself, piece by piece, as something with actual outside teeth, something bigger than the hurt she'd been carrying around for seven months like a stone in her pocket.
"So this isn't just about her being angry, or broke, or whatever the reason is she decided to start pulling money out of my accounts. "