He had himself.
* * *
Chapter 8: Anna
The name had come to him on the second night, from Lucia, in the way that all the useful things on this strange journey had come — sideways, over tea.
"They fired a girl on Monday," Lucia had said, wrapping the leftover rice. "Young thing, an analyst. Cried in the lobby. Reyes says she made a scene in some meeting, but Marta from accounting says the girl found something in the numbers and got scared." Lucia had shaken her head. "The day people chew up the young ones."
Anna Kowalski. Eddie had the name from the termination list he'd memorized — one of three Monday firings, the one marked "nervousness in investor meeting." He'd signed the paperwork without reading it. He remembered that now with a shame so physical it made his jaw ache.
Finding her took most of his one free afternoon. A junior analyst's salary, a Queens walk-up — he narrowed it by memory of the HR file and by asking at a deli near the subway stop where the Tower's junior staff bought their lunch. The deli owner remembered Anna. "Nice girl. Polish. Always the soup." He pointed up the block.
The building was brick, five stories, the kind with the stairs on the outside of the windows. Eddie climbed to the fourth floor and knocked on 4B, and the door opened on a young woman with dark circles under her eyes and a laptop bag still slung over her shoulder, as if she'd just come home or was about to leave.
"Anna Kowalski?" he said.
She stared at him — the coat, the beard, the cap. "Who are you?"
"My name is Eddie. I clean floors at Whitmore Tower at night." He held her gaze. "I think you found something in the numbers, and I think that's why they fired you. I'd like to talk about it. Not here in the hall — wherever you feel safe."
She didn't open the door wider. "Are you a reporter?"
"No."
"A lawyer?"
"No." He paused. "I'm someone who mops the corridor outside the rooms where they talk. That's all I can tell you that you'll believe right now."
Something in her face changed — not trust, but recognition of a fellow person who'd been made small. She stepped back. "Five minutes. The kitchen. Don't touch anything."
The apartment was tiny and immaculate. A desk in the corner held a laptop and a neat stack of folders, and Eddie saw the way her eyes went to them and away — the way a person looks at something they're afraid of and can't stop guarding.
He sat where she pointed and told her the truth, in the shape he could tell it: that he'd overheard Vane and Cole in Conference Room C, that he knew about the Q3 numbers, that he knew what December was for. He watched her face as he spoke, and he watched the exact moment the fear in her broke through the caution — her hands tightening on the edge of the table.
"Say it back to me," he said gently. "So I know I heard it right."
It took her a minute. Then it came out in a rush — the Pacific contracts, the revenue pulled forward, the deferred costs buried in footnotes she'd been asked to draft and had refused to sign. She'd flagged it to her manager. Her manager had told her to drop it. She'd gone into the investor meeting on Monday intending to say nothing, and then Vane had put up a slide with her numbers on it — her numbers, altered — and she'd frozen. Not nervousness. Terror. The terror of a twenty-six-year-old who understood, in real time, that she was looking at a fraud and that everyone in the room was pretending not to see it.
"They fired me by noon," she said. Her voice was steady now, which was worse than tears. "My manager said I lacked composure. For an analyst." She laughed once, a dry sound. "I kept copies. Of everything. I know I wasn't supposed to, but I kept them."
She went to the desk, and her hands shook only a little as she opened the bottom drawer and took out a thick manila envelope. She held it for a long moment — he could see the weight of the decision in her shoulders — and then she held it out to him.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked. "A janitor. Why do you care?"
Eddie took the envelope. It was heavier than it looked. "Because somebody has to," he said. "And because you were brave, Anna. Braver than the people in that room. Don't let them make you believe otherwise."
She studied him, and he saw her filing him away — the beard, the stained hands — as one more inexplicable thing in a week of inexplicable things. "Will it matter?" she asked quietly. "The envelope. Will it actually matter?"
He thought about the ledger in the guard booth. The envelope of cash in Victor's palm. The napkin in his coat pocket with the fraud written on it in his own hand. He thought about Grace's soup and Lucia's tea and the plaque on his office door.
"Yes," he said. "I promise you it will matter."
On the subway back to Manhattan, the envelope tucked inside his coat, Eddie watched the city slide past the windows and thought about the three names on the Monday termination list. Anna was the first. There were two more — Megan, Theo — and he would find them too, quietly, the way he'd found Anna. Not yet. First he had to understand the full shape of what he was holding.