CHAPTER SIXTEEN RHODES
The weeks leading up to Fenwick’s capture had worn me down in ways I hadn’t fully registered until I looked in the mirror one morning and barely recognized the hollow-eyed man staring back.
I’d lost weight without meaning to, skipping meals in favor of another hour reviewing surveillance reports, sleeping in increasingly shorter stretches interrupted by phone calls that turned out, more often than not, to be nothing.
Petra’s comment about Delphine’s access had stayed with me longer than I expected, and I’d quietly asked one of our internal auditors to review the full scope of her standing permissions the week before Fenwick’s arrest, a request I made without telling anyone why, some instinct I couldn’t yet name insisting the answer mattered more than I wanted it to.
Bram and I spent that entire final week running down leads that led nowhere, a warehouse in Ohio that turned out to belong to an entirely unrelated business, a financial transaction that looked promising for six hours before collapsing into an innocent explanation.
I remember standing in the surveillance room at nearly midnight, watching a wall of monitors that showed nothing useful, and asking Bram, more out of exhaustion than any real expectation of an honest answer, whether he thought we were ever going to catch him.
“We will,” Bram said. “Men like Fenwick always make one mistake eventually. Patience runs out, or arrogance takes over, or they get tired of waiting for an opportunity and manufacture one that isn’t as clean as they think it is. Our job is just to still be watching when it happens.”
“And if it takes another two months? Another six?”
“Then it takes that long, and you keep doing what you’re doing, and you keep hoping the woman you sent away still wants to hear from you when it’s finally over.”
I didn’t have an answer for that, and Bram didn’t offer one, both of us returning to the monitors in a silence that had become almost comfortable in its shared grimness.
The call came at four in the morning, Bram’s voice tight with an adrenaline I recognized because I felt the mirror of it in my own chest before he’d finished the sentence.
Fenwick had been apprehended attempting to cross into Canada with a go-bag and a burner phone full of surveillance photographs of my wife, evidence solid enough that federal prosecutors were already discussing charges that would keep him behind bars for years.
It was over.
The relief hit me so hard I had to sit down on the edge of my own bed, my legs suddenly unable to hold my weight, and the first coherent thought that followed the relief was simple and enormous: Maren can come home.
I imagined the whole reunion in the space of a few seconds, flying to her that morning, telling her everything, watching her forgive me the moment she understood everything I’d been trying to protect her from.
I sat there in the dark for several minutes simply breathing, the specific, physical sensation of a fear I’d carried for two months finally beginning to loosen its grip on my chest.
It took another two days of digging through the case file before I found the detail that turned my relief into something closer to rage.
Fenwick’s location had been confirmed by our own surveillance team forty-eight hours before Bram told me about the arrest. The information had come in, been logged, and then sat unactioned in a queue that should have taken minutes to clear, a delay so unusual that Bram himself had flagged it as an anomaly worth investigating before I’d even asked.
“I’ve been going through the timestamps for an hour and I don’t like what I’m seeing,” Bram said, spreading the printouts across my desk with the particular grimness of a man who suspected the answer before he’d fully confirmed it.
“Someone held this. Deliberately. And whoever it was knew exactly how to route around the system without leaving an obvious trail.”
“Who has that kind of access, Bram? Realistically.”
“Very few people. You. Me. The senior analysts on the surveillance team.” He hesitated, and I watched him pick his next words with care. “And anyone with standing on the family trust, since that clearance was written into the original security charter before either of us ran this company.”
I felt something cold settle into my chest even before he finished the sentence, some part of me already understanding where this was heading and dreading the confirmation of it.
The audit Petra had prompted came back that same afternoon, confirming what I’d already begun to suspect: Delphine’s access extended far beyond what her actual role justified, a legacy privilege nobody had thought to revisit in over a decade.
I traced the delay through three layers of the security team’s internal logs before I found where it actually originated: an instruction, given verbally rather than through any official channel, to hold the confirmation until further notice.
Given by Delphine, using her standing as family and majority family trustee to override a protocol she had no operational authority to touch, a fact the junior analyst who’d received the instruction confirmed with visible discomfort once I sat him down and asked him plainly what had happened.
“She said it was a sensitivity issue,” the analyst told me, unable to meet my eyes. “Said the family wanted to control the timing of the announcement for reasons above my clearance. I didn’t think to question it, sir. She’s family. She’s had standing access longer than I’ve worked here.”
I thanked him for his honesty and told him he’d done nothing wrong, and then I sat alone in my office for nearly an hour before I called Delphine, turning the pieces of it over and over, trying to construct any version of the story that didn’t end where I already knew it was going to end.
I confronted her in my office that same afternoon, the case file open on the desk between us, printouts of the delayed confirmation laid out in a neat, damning row.
“I wanted more time,” she finally said, quiet, none of her usual polish left in her voice, her hands folded tightly in her lap. “I wanted her to believe it was really over between you. I wanted you to see, once and for all, what it looked like when I was the one standing beside you instead of her.”
“You let me believe my wife was still in danger for two extra days, Delphine. Do you understand what that could have cost, if something else had happened in that window? If Fenwick had slipped the surveillance and reached her before we caught him?”
“I understand exactly what it could have cost,” she said, and something in her voice cracked, briefly, before she caught it and smoothed it back into place. “I told myself the risk was small enough to accept. I told myself a great many things over the past month that I no longer entirely believe.”
“I let you believe what you already believed,” she continued after a moment, some of the old composure returning now that the worst of the confession was out.
“I only slowed down the moment it stopped serving what I wanted. You built the rest of this yourself, Rhodes. Long before I ever touched it. The photographs. The affair no one committed. The decision to send her away in the first place. I only found the crack that was already there and made it slightly wider.”
“How long?” I asked. “How long have you wanted this?”
She was quiet for a moment, and when she answered, her voice had lost every trace of the performance she usually wore so effortlessly.
“Since we were sixteen. Since before you ever knew me as anything other than the girl your family expected you to marry someday. I watched you fall in love with her at that charity dinner five years ago and I told myself I’d be happy for you.
I have been miserable every single day since. ”
“Why didn’t you ever say anything? At sixteen, at twenty, at any point before you had a wife to compete against?”
“Because you never once looked at me the way you looked at her,” Delphine said, and for the first time in the entire conversation, her voice held no calculation in it at all, only a plain, unguarded grief.
“I told myself if I said it out loud, I’d lose even the friendship.
At least as your friend, I got to stay close.
I got to be in the room. I told myself that was enough, for years, until it wasn’t anymore, until watching you build a life with her became something I couldn’t stand being close to without wanting to break it. ”
“I never gave you a reason to believe there was a version of this where that could happen, Delphine. Not once. Not at sixteen, not at any point since.”
“I know,” she said, and something in her face, for just a moment, looked genuinely broken rather than calculating.
“I knew it the whole time. It didn’t stop me from wanting it anyway.
Wanting something and knowing it’s impossible have never once canceled each other out, in my experience.
I simply got tired of carrying the second half of that alone. ”
I told her she was right about one part of that confession and wrong about the rest, and I meant both halves entirely.
“You found the crack,” I said. “I put it there. Everything that happened between me and Maren, every decision that made her doubt me, I made those choices myself, and I’m not going to let you carry more of the blame than you actually earned.
But what you did with that opening, delaying information that could have brought her home two days sooner, using her fear against both of us, that’s yours.
That’s entirely yours, and I won’t excuse it, not for thirty years of friendship, not for feelings I never asked for and never returned. ”
“I’m not asking you to excuse it.”
“Good. Because I don’t.”
I removed her from every position that gave her access to my company, my house, or my wife that same hour, revoking her standing on the family trust with a phone call to our attorneys that took less than ten minutes and ended a friendship that had lasted nearly thirty years.
She didn’t argue. She simply gathered her things and left my office with a composure I found, by that point, almost unbearable to witness, pausing once at the door.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, not turning back to face me, “I hope she comes home. I mean that too, even now. I think I’ve always meant more of what I said to you than either of us wanted to believe.”
She left, and I did not look back once on my way out of the building.
Then I booked a flight to bring my wife home, understanding, for the first time with total clarity, that Delphine’s confession had answered one question and left the harder one entirely untouched: whether I would have sent Maren away at all, if Delphine had never whispered a single suggestion in my ear.
I spent the flight staring out the window at clouds I couldn’t have described five minutes after looking at them, my mind cycling through every version of the conversation I was about to have, rehearsing apologies that sounded, on the third or fourth run-through, increasingly hollow even to my own ears.
I had spent two months treating this moment as the finish line, the point at which the danger ended and the marriage simply resumed, and somewhere over what I guessed was Nebraska, I finally let myself consider, seriously and without flinching, the possibility that Maren might not see it the same way at all.
I thought about Bram’s question from that very first night: does she know this is temporary.
I had never answered it honestly, not to him and not to myself, and sitting on that plane with nothing to do but think, I finally admitted that I had never told Maren anything that would have let her know it.
I had built an entire private timeline for our reconciliation and never once given her the map.
I had expected her to trust a plan I refused to share, the same failure that had started this entire catastrophe in the first place, playing out again, in miniature, in my own head, thirty thousand feet above a country I was crossing to reclaim something I had never actually earned the right to reclaim on my own terms.
By the time the plane touched down, I understood with painful clarity that I had no idea what I was actually walking into, and that the certainty I’d carried across three states might be the single largest mistake left standing between us.