Chapter Six #2
I didn't cry. I didn't slam my laptop shut or storm across the room to correct them.
I sat very still, the way I had on the porch two weeks earlier, and I let the anger settle into the same cold, precise place I keep everything else that needs to be handled carefully instead of loudly, and I thought, with a clarity that scared me exactly as much as it had the first time, that whatever grovel Rourke thought he owed me, it was going to have to be big enough to undo not just what he'd done to me privately, but what this entire room, this entire club, had watched happen and quietly decided was fine.
I closed my laptop a little after one, packed up my notes, and walked past the bar toward the door without stopping.
Rourke came out of the office just as I was leaving, like he'd been listening for the sound of my chair, and for a second our eyes met across the room, and I watched him try to read my face and fail, because I'd made sure, by then, that there was nothing on it left to read.
"Find anything?" he asked, careful, professional, exactly the way Deacon had instructed him to be.
"Enough to keep digging," I said. "I'll be back Monday."
I didn't tell him what I'd overheard. Some things, I decided walking out to my truck, he was going to have to learn the size of on his own, the same way I was learning it, one casual, careless comment at a time.
I sat in the parking lot for a few minutes before I started the engine, my legal pad open on the passenger seat, three dates circled in red where the padded invoices had landed.
Two months. Three anomalies so far, and something in the careful, patient way they'd been structured told me I hadn't found all of them yet, not by a long way.
I thought about the vendor account Rourke had set up years back for convenience, the one that hadn't required a signature, and I thought about who exactly had been in that house, with that kind of casual, comfortable access to a laptop that almost certainly had those login credentials saved, during the exact weeks those invoices had gone through.
I wasn't ready yet to say the thought out loud, not even to myself in an empty truck, but it sat there anyway, cold and unavoidable, the way any real number does once you've found it.
I called Essie on the drive back to her place, put her on speaker while I drove, and told her about the invoices, about the two men at the bar and their careless, casual gossip, about the specific, ugly clarity of hearing prospects had wondered whether Harlow deserved my seat at club events before I'd even made it home.
"God, Mars," Essie said, quiet for a second. "I'm sorry. That's a special kind of awful to have to sit and listen to."
"I didn't say anything. I just kept typing."
"Of course you did. You'd have finished the spreadsheet during your own funeral if somebody handed you a laptop.
" There was a small, dry affection in the way she said it, the kind of joke that only lands right between people who've known each other's worst moments and loved each other through all of them anyway.
"How's it feel, being back in that building? "
I thought about the question honestly before I answered it, watching the road unspool ahead of me in the late-afternoon light.
"Complicated," I finally said. "The work feels good.
Finding the pattern in those invoices, watching the numbers actually cooperate and tell me something true, that part feels like the first solid ground I've stood on in two weeks.
Being in the same room as him feels like standing next to a live wire I know better than to touch, but can't quite make myself walk away from either. "
"That's not nothing, Mars."
"It's not everything either. I need you to not read more into it than what it actually is right now."
"I'm not reading anything into it," Essie said, in a tone that made clear she absolutely was, but was choosing, out of love, not to push it any further tonight.
"I just think you should let yourself feel whatever you're actually feeling instead of filing it away in one of those mental spreadsheets of yours where everything has to have a clean, defensible category before you're allowed to acknowledge it exists. "
I didn't have a response for that one that didn't sound defensive, so I let it sit, and we talked instead about something easier, a client of mine who'd called that morning with a tax question, the mundane texture of a life that still, somehow, had to keep functioning underneath everything else that had broken.
By the time I pulled into her driveway, the sun was dropping low and orange over the ridge, and I sat for a minute with the engine off, looking at my notes one more time, three red circles on a legal pad that were going to keep me up half the night working out exactly what they meant, and who, beyond the obvious answer I wasn't ready yet to say out loud, might have had a reason to want that money gone.
I went inside and made myself eat something, more out of discipline than appetite, and spent another hour at Essie's kitchen table with the same legal pad in front of me, cross-referencing dates against the calendar on my phone, the calls I remembered making home during those nine weeks, the nights I'd talked to Rourke and thought everything on his end sounded normal.
It didn't take long to notice that the login timestamps clustered heaviest in the evenings, after nine, after the hours I'd usually caught him on the phone, which meant either whoever accessed that vendor account had waited until after our calls ended, or hadn't needed to hide from him at all because he already knew.
I didn't let myself finish that thought all the way.
Some truths, I was learning, need to be approached carefully, the same way you'd defuse something, one wire at a time instead of all at once.
Essie found me still at the table past ten, notes spread out in front of me like a crime scene diagram, and didn't say anything about the hour, just refilled my water glass and sat down across from me with a magazine she had no real intention of reading, the quiet, steady company of someone who understood that some nights the kindest thing you can offer a person is simply not leaving them alone with their own thoughts.
I worked until nearly midnight before I finally closed the laptop, no closer to a full picture than I'd been at noon, but with enough of an outline forming that I already knew Monday's session was going to bring me somewhere I wasn't going to like.
I lay awake a long while after I finally turned off the light, staring at Essie's spare-room ceiling, running the numbers over one more time in my head the way I always do when a set of books won't quite let me sleep.
Somewhere in that darkness, underneath the anger and the grief and the sheer exhaustion of the last two weeks, a small, stubborn part of me noted that I hadn't felt this alive, this precisely engaged with a problem, since before my mother's diagnosis turned my whole life into something I was just surviving one day at a time.
I didn't know yet what to do with that feeling.
I only knew, lying there, that whatever came next, I wasn't going back to being a woman who let her own competence go unused just because using it meant walking back into a building that still, in ways I hadn't fully reckoned with, felt like home.
Somewhere near sleep, my thoughts drifted, unbidden, to Rourke standing in my office doorway that afternoon, plain-faced and unflinching, handing me the ugliest version of the truth before I ever had to go looking for it myself.
I didn't know what to do with that memory either.
I only knew it sat differently in my chest than anything else he'd said to me since the porch, and that noticing the difference scared me more than the anger ever had.