Chapter 25 #2
She nodded once, already reaching for her phone.
I watched her pace a step or two while it rang, her fingers tapping lightly against the back of the phone.
“Hi, yes,” she said when someone picked up. “I’m calling to verify an account under the name Alice Rodriguez.”
Her face didn’t change at first as she waited. Then her brows pulled together slightly.
“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 mean she 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.”
“Exactly,” she said. “So in your system, she never stopped existing as an employee. She just became inactive.”
I nodded slowly.
“And your system,” she went on, “automatically increases salaries every year. Five percent across the board. And it doesn’t stop unless someone is fully removed. Plus she has shares I’m sure you didn’t adjust…”
The piece fell into place for me. I’m a fucking idiot.
“So I’ve been paying her this whole time.”
“Looks that way,” Rory replied.
I exhaled slowly.
“…so where the hell is the money going?”
She lifted the phone slightly, signaling she was still on hold, then answered anyway.
“To me.”
I rubbed my temple, still trying to come to terms with the fact I had been paying a dead woman for twenty-five years because I couldn’t let go.
“What?”
“When Mom got married, she combined her active finances with Dad,” she said. “But her original employee account? She turned it into something else. I’m thinking a custodial account set up for me before I was even born.”
My brows pulled together.
“You saying she been funneling money into an account for you this whole time?”
“No,” she corrected. “You have.”
My eye twitched.
“You never closed her employee profile. You never stopped the salary. And because she had shares in the company, that means her distributions—her profits—would’ve still been tied to that same structure unless they were manually reassigned.”
I stared at her.
“Look, I’m sure she probably put it to the side to give to me on my eighteenth birthday or some shit. But she died before she got the chance to tell me about it.”
“And because nobody’s been withdrawing from it…” I started.
“It’s been compounding,” she finished.
We both went quiet for a second.
“Over years,” she added. “With interest. With reinvestment.”
I ran a hand down my face slowly.
She lifted the phone again slightly as the hold music shifted. Before I could question it further, the voice on the other end of her call came back.
She straightened immediately. “Yes, I’m here.”
A pause.
“Yes, that’s me.”
Another pause.
“Okay,” she said. “Yes. I can verify.”
She glanced at me again.
“They need a passcode,” she said, covering the phone slightly. “You got any idea what she would’ve used?”
“I didn’t even know about this account! How am I supposed to know a goddamn code?”
“…wait,” she said quietly. She pulled the phone back to her ear. “Try Levi.”
Pause.
“Yes.”
My face screwed up. My middle name I never told anybody outside Dillon and Alice?
“Verification confirmed.”
Rory closed her eyes for a second. Then opened them again. She didn’t say anything right away after the verification went through.
“Ay man, how you find out the passcode was my middle name?”
Her eyes turned to me, thinking.
“…that’s my middle name.”
What the fuck.
“I don’t know what’s more fucked up,” she sighed. “The fact that my mother gave me your middle name or that we fuck raw and this is the first time we heard each other’s middle names.”
“Definitely the first one.” I rotated my shoulder that the sling laid on. “Who gives a fuck about anyone’s middle name anymore.”
“Fair.”
Then she straightened when the voice on the phone spoke again.
“Can you put it on speaker?” I asked.
She tapped the screen and lowered the phone between us.
The voice on the other end came through clear now.
“Can you confirm the current balance on the account please?” Rory asked.
There was a brief pause while the representative pulled it up.
I didn’t realize I had stopped breathing until I heard it.
“…the current balance, including accrued interest and reinvested distributions, is nine hundred and ninety-three million, four hundred and—”
I didn’t hear the rest. Because that number—
“…you serious?” I muttered, more to myself than anybody else.
About a billion dollars…
I looked at her. “Do you know what this means?”
She turned to me and grinned slowly. “You need a loan from me?”
“Tuh!” I picked up Dillon’s resignation letter and handed it back to her. “Read the fine print, sweetheart.”
She took it with force and scanned the document.
“Fuck.”
“Yup, he left the role to you.” I poked. “So get your fine ass in the car, let’s go to the bank, get this money and fix our company.”
She narrowed her eyes on me. “Say please.”