Chapter 6
The coastal fog had burned off by nine, and by ten-forty, spring light shone through the antechamber windows.
Wren had the next quarter’s calendar consolidation open across both screens and was three weeks into a job she had not yet found the core of her role.
Between seasons, the building had gone dry since the heat had been shut off, but the air conditioning wasn’t turned on to replace it. She tried to ignore the dryness.
Her email softly chimed twice, the signal there’s something flagged.
It was from Veronica Kepling’s office, forwarded down with a single line on top: Wren, can you handle this?
Veronica ran operations, and for nine years, she had been Cordelia’s right-hand person.
Wren had spoken to her twice in three weeks, both times briefly, both times having left with the sense of having been read down to the studs in under a minute.
Wren read the thread under it to gather all the facts.
An internal audit query had landed on a single expense from last quarter’s books.
On its face, it was routine. But the expense ran to a vendor Wren knew—one of the relationships folded into the confidential restructuring she had been working on since her second day—which meant it was not the small housekeeping item the audit team took it for.
The second message had set a deadline to have the documentation by the end of the day, and the third was from the legal department.
She read through it again, this time slower.
It was a leak. Not a bad one yet, but leave it sitting, and it would turn sour.
Someone in audit would keep pulling at the Halvorsen expense thread until it led them, sooner or later, to the restructuring, and it wasn’t ready to go public to the rest of the company yet.
A day, maybe two, and it would be exposed.
Something in her had already started moving. Six years of this work, and her body knew the order of how to contain this before her mind did, already lining up the calls, one behind the next. She was on her feet without quite remembering standing.
She crossed the antechamber to the open door of the inner office.
Cordelia sat at her desk with two folders squared in front of her, the phone cradled against her ear, saying something low and firm into it.
Wren stopped in the doorway and waited. She’d learned over the last three weeks not to announce herself and to let Cordelia address her in her own timing.
Cordelia looked up at her. “I’ll call you back later,” she said on the phone, then hung up.
Wren stepped forward. “There’s something you need to know about. An audit query came up on the Halvorsen expense, and they want it documented by the end of the day.”
Wren didn’t offer a solution. She had learned that about Cordelia too.
She wanted the facts stated plainly without any embellishment, and Wren had learned to deliver the news that way, even if she had to bite her tongue.
Cordelia didn’t ask her any questions, which was strange in its own right.
Every other boss she had ever worked for if handed a leak wanted to verbally process it, wanted to go through every detail, every name, every date until they scoured the whole paper trail, as if repeating it could reassure them and keep it from getting out.
But not Cordelia. She only looked at Wren, something moving behind her eyes that Wren couldn’t quite interpret, and then said, “Handle it. Come back when it’s done.”
Wren stared at her, waiting for more direction but none came.
There was no checklist of what Cordelia was expecting Wren to do to solve the issue, and she fully delegated it without a second thought.
Even Wren’s brilliant and careful bosses had kept a piece of it for themselves, just in case.
Something in Wren warmed at it, at being handed the whole of something and being trusted to carry it through.
“I’m on it,” Wren said and walked out.
Back at her desk, she made the first call before she fully sat down.
The first one was to Margot Pell, the senior auditor whose name was on the query.
Wren had met her once, in her orientation week.
Margot had been wearing a gray suit and had a firm handshake, and Wren had instantly recognized her name from the organizational chart she had built her second week.
She found Margot’s direct line in the company directory and dialed.
“This is Wren Davies from Ms. Hale’s office.
” She kept her voice easy and unhurried, like a woman with all the time in the world.
“I noticed you’ve got a query open on the Halvorsen file, and I’ve got the documentation for it.
I’d rather not send it over cold, though.
There’s some context that’s best explained in person.
Could I come down within the hour and walk you through it? ”
There was a pause filled with papers shuffling as Margot found the file. “Within the hour is fine. I’ve got until the end of the day to close this loop.”
“You’ll have it before lunch.” Wren set the phone down.
That was the part that mattered most, which was why Wren had made it her first call. As long as the audit team was waiting on her for the paperwork, they weren’t off chasing it down on their own and turning a small problem into a much larger one.
The second call was to legal. She hadn’t yet met the corporate attorney, but she knew Petra Voss was a younger woman. Wren had seen Petra’s name on a handful of memos, always the first to answer a thread. She dialed her extension.
Before the phone could finish its first ring, it clicked. “Voss.”
“Wren Davies from Ms. Hale’s office. There’s a query open that came out of a meeting last week.
The reference number is 4471. The Halvorsen expense got mentioned in there, and it shouldn’t have been yet.
” Wren pulled a legal pad toward her. “If audit decides to follow up with anyone who was in that room, I’d like to know who they would call, so I can get to them first, just to keep the narrative consistent. ”
The line went quiet, and she could practically hear Voss mentally running through the list of people who were at that meeting. She let the silence linger—ten seconds, maybe fifteen. The sharp ones always took an extra beat to be thorough, and Voss was nothing if not sharp.
“Most likely these two.” Voss gave her the names, and Wren scribbled them on the notepad. “Those are the ones who would actually field a call. The third person was barely in the room.”
“That’s what I needed. Thank you.” Wren circled the two names.
The final call was to the vendor behind the Halvorsen line, a woman named Ingrid Ostberg.
She had been affiliated with the firm for six years and one of the few people outside the building who knew about the restructuring, which made her someone worth protecting from a stray phone call.
Wren reached for the phone and called her on the secure line.
It rang for a long while, half a world away.
“Ostberg,” Ingrid said with a German accent and a room full of chatter behind her.
“Ms. Ostberg, this is Wren Davies, calling from Cordelia Hale’s office. I’m sorry to catch you so late in your day.”
“Nearly evening,” Ingrid clarified. “I’m in Geneva. What happened?”
“Nothing yet, and I want to keep it that way. There’s an internal query open that brushes up against the Halvorsen line. It’s contained, but if anyone from our side reaches out to you directly over the next couple of days, I’d be grateful if you happened to be unreachable.”
She laughed, short and dry. “I am in board meetings until Thursday. I’m unreachable to my own mother.” She paused. “But thank you for the call. Most people wouldn’t have thought to make it.”
“Thank you.” Wren let out a breath.
Three calls in barely fifteen minutes. She set the phone down and stayed there a moment, perfectly still and aware of her own pulse, quick and steady, and of how good it felt to have done something hard and done it well.
She’d forgotten that feeling—or at least taught herself to live without it.
This was the thing she was good at, better than almost anyone she had worked beside, and it was the same thing that had ground her down to nothing by the time she was thirty-one, until she’d walked away from all of it with empty hands.
For eleven months, she had been sure that part of her was gone for good.
And here it was, back like it had never left, and that frightened her more than losing it ever had. She pushed away the feeling.
The rest was paperwork. She pulled the expense summary from the deal files she’d had since her second day on the job, printed it, and read it over while standing at the printer, checking every line twice.
Every number on it was accurate, just presented in a way where it looked like nothing—a routine vendor payment, the kind the firm made a hundred times a quarter—with nothing on the page about why this vendor mattered.
She wasn’t lying to anyone, necessarily, just making the document seem as mundane as possible to not raise any red flags.
She carried it to the third floor. The audit floor was brighter and louder than the executive floor, and the windows were cracked open, letting in the ambient sounds of the harbor and gulls.
Margot had a corner desk with a second monitor turned sideways and a mug of coffee gone cold beside it.
Wren sat across from Margot and took her through the line items one at a time, answering Margot’s questions and not volunteering any information not inquired about.
When Wren was done, she set the document on the desk and wrote her direct extension on top.
Margot skimmed the first page. “I admit; this is tidier than most of what crosses my desk.”