Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Bunny was sitting in the chair by the window, looking at Tatum the way she always looked at her, with the particular attention of someone taking inventory.
"You look pale," Bunny said.
"I'm always pale," Tatum rasped.
"You look paler than usual." Bunny crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt. "You should be resting."
"I am resting." Tatum gestured at the couch she was sitting on, the files spread across the cushion beside her, the legal pad balanced on her knee. "This is me resting."
"That," Bunny said, with a precision that had not diminished one degree since Tatum had woken up in a hospital bed six weeks ago with her mother sitting beside her looking composed and slightly inconvenienced, "is not resting. That is working. They are different things."
"The Anderson case isn't going to work itself."
Bunny's expression didn't change. "The Anderson case is not your concern."
"It is, actually." Tatum made a note on the legal pad. "The woman who filed the original suit is looking for others. She's building toward a class action. That changes the strategy considerably, and someone needs to be across it."
"Someone else can be across it."
"I know it best." It still struck Tatum as odd that her mother cared at all. Usually, Bunny would be telling her to work harder. Even Stuart had backed off. It made her nervous.
"Tatum." Bunny's voice carried the particular tone it held when she had decided a conversation was over.
"You were in a coma for three weeks. You have only been out of the hospital for six.
You went back to the office two weeks ago against medical advice—against my advice—and you are doing too much. "
Tatum rubbed the back of her head. The scar was still tender in a way that caught her off guard sometimes, a sudden, sharp reminder of a parking garage floor that she had told everyone she couldn't remember.
"Headache?" Bunny asked. Her eyes had sharpened.
"It's starting to build a little," Tatum said. "I'm fine."
"You are not fine. You need to stop for the day."
Tatum glanced at the window. The light was going. Past five, probably closer to six. Her mother could have told her to stop earlier but she hadn’t. The new Bunny was caring but only so much. She kept that thought to herself.
"Perhaps you're right," she said.
Bunny looked faintly suspicious at the capitulation but accepted it with the grace of someone accustomed to getting what she wanted. She uncrossed her legs and stood, smoothing her coat, the ritual preparations for departure that Tatum had watched her whole life.
"I'll call tomorrow morning," Bunny said. "Before the meeting."
"Of course," Tatum said.
Bunny paused at the door. She looked at Tatum for a moment with the expression that Tatum had never been able to fully read, not love exactly, not the kind of love that looked like other people's love, but something that might have been its closest available approximation in a woman who had decided a long time ago that sentiment was a luxury she couldn't afford.
"Get some sleep," Bunny said.
"Goodnight, Mother," Tatum said.
The door closed.
Tatum sat on the couch for a full two minutes without moving. She counted them. An old habit, learned from a lifetime of bracing for the worst, the discipline of waiting long enough to be sure.
Then she set the legal pad on the coffee table, gathered the files, and walked into her closet.
She pressed the panel, stepped into her secret room, then closed the door behind her.
A sense of the familiar and eagerness filled her as she stood in the quiet of the smallish space.
The research wall was different now. Rebuilt from scratch in the weeks since she'd come home, using the copies Ryker had given her and everything she'd reconstructed from memory, which turned out to be considerable.
The amnesia had been real for the first week.
Fragments and fog and a blinding headache that made thinking feel like trying to see through frosted glass.
Then it had all come back.
The folder on her mother's desk. Thistledew. The garage. Josh's face above her, the particular expression on it in the last moment before she hit the ground. The cold concrete against the back of her head.
Archer's voice calling her name.
She had lain in the hospital bed for four days after it came back and said nothing to anyone about any of it.
She had looked at her mother, sitting in the chair beside her bed, immaculate and solicitous and entirely unreadable.
In that moment, she had understood with complete clarity that knowing what she knew and appearing to know nothing was the only advantage she had left.
So she had kept it.
She sat down in her leather chair and looked at the wall.
Two months of slow, careful, methodical work.
Two months of pretending to take it easy while Ryker's files built up on her desk, and the picture on the wall grew more complete, and the threads she'd been pulling on for what felt like her entire adult life finally, finally started to connect to something solid.
She'd found it three days ago.
Lebowitz's cut. The money he'd siphoned off from his unauthorized investors, the retirees, the unauthorized add-ons, and the people who had handed over their savings because a man with a nice suit and a warm smile had told them it was safe.
She'd traced the funds through four accounts in three countries and found it sitting in a holding company in Malta that had no apparent connection to anything except, if you looked very carefully at the registered agent, a small law firm in George Town that she'd seen before.
She had the account numbers. She had the routing information. She had enough to move the money or to give someone else what they needed to move it.
She had a meeting in forty minutes.
She changed her clothes slowly and deliberately, the way she did everything these days in public and semi-public, performing the careful movements of someone still recovering.
She wore flat shoes and a loose sweater and left her hair down.
She checked her reflection in the closet mirror and thought, not for the first time, that she looked like someone who had been through something.
The shadows under her eyes were permanent now, or felt that way.
The quality of her face had changed in some way she couldn't precisely name, something had gone out of it that she wasn't sure she wanted back because what had replaced it, whatever it was, felt more honest.
She took the elevator down and left through the side entrance.
The restaurant was four blocks away. She walked them at the pace of someone for whom four blocks required attention and effort, which wasn’t entirely a performance. She tired more easily than she had. The headaches came without warning. She was not, if she was being honest, entirely well.
She pushed through the door.
Armand Fontaine was already there, which she'd expected. He was at a corner table, his large frame settled on the chair with the unhurried ease of a man entirely comfortable waiting, his hands wrapped around a coffee cup, his dark eyes finding her the moment she came through the door.
He rose when she reached the table, all of him, the full considerable height of him, and the warmth in his expression was so genuine and so uncomplicated that she felt it land somewhere behind her sternum in a way that made her throat tight.
"Tatum," he said, and took both her hands briefly in his large ones before releasing them and waiting for her to sit before he sat himself. "It is good to see you up and moving. You look better than last week."
"That's a low bar," she said.
"Oui," he agreed pleasantly. "But we take what we can get.
" He studied her face with unhurried attention, a trait of the man who had spent decades reading people and cared about what he was reading.
"How are you, truly? And do not tell me fine.
I know what fine looks like and I know what not fine looks like, and I have known you long enough to tell the difference. "
She almost smiled at that. "Some days are better than others. The headaches are improving. I tire more easily than I'd like." She paused. "I'm functional."
"Functional," he repeated. He said it gently, without judgment, but with the precision of a man noting that functional and well were not the same word at all. "This is not the same as well, you understand."
"I know," she said. "It's enough for now."
He nodded slowly and did not push, which was one of the things she valued most about Armand. He knew when to press and when to let something breathe, and he let this breathe.
The waiter came. Tatum ordered tea. Armand ordered more coffee and something to eat and looked at her with one raised eyebrow until she added a piece of toast to the order, which she hadn't been going to do and which she probably needed.
"I found it," she said, when the waiter had gone.
Armand's eyes sharpened immediately, all the warmth still there, but something else arriving behind it.
"Lebowitz's cut," she said. "The money from the unauthorized investors. The retirees. All of it." She reached into her bag, took out a folded piece of paper, and then slid it across the table. "Account numbers. Routing information. It's in Malta. It has been sitting there the whole time."
Armand unfolded the paper and looked at it for a long moment without speaking, his expression giving nothing away.
This man, who had moved weapons across three continents, understood that showing a reaction to important information was a luxury he could not always afford.
Then he refolded it with great care and put it in his breast pocket.
"Can you get it back to them?" Tatum asked. "To the people it was taken from? Including Jason Sakstra? He was pressured into it by his employer, and he lost everything."