He had no answer.
Chapter 13: Forged Initials
Greer opened another ledger and went quiet.
His hand stopped halfway down a page. He did not turn it. He did not look up.
"What is it?" I said.
He slid the book toward me without answering.
"Martin," Thomas said. "What did you find?"
Greer said, "Dates."
I pulled the ledger closer. The entries were neat, the same careful hand I had seen before. Beside several of them, small and hidden in the margin, were two letters.
T.W.
I looked at the date at the top of the page.
"This is March," I said.
"Yes," Greer said.
"She died in February."
No one said anything.
I turned the page. April. June. September. The initials appeared again and again, tucked beside amounts I did not want to add up.
"Dad," I said.
Thomas leaned over my shoulder. I felt him go still.
"Clara, I did not authorize those," he said.
"But your initials are here."
"I know what it looks like."
"That was not my question."
"It is my answer," he said. "I did not authorize those."
"Then who wrote them?" I asked.
"I do not know."
"You do not know, or you did not look?"
Greer said, "The board was told you had approved a transition protocol, Thomas."
"I approved nothing," Thomas said.
"Were you told that?" I asked Greer.
"I was told a great many things," Greer said. "I believed most of them."
I stared at the initials again. Small. Confident. Almost hidden.
Someone had been using my father's identity. Or my father was lying to my face in a room my mother had built for the truth.
I did not know which was worse. One meant a stranger had worn his name after her death. The other meant he had kept signing while I grieved.
"Tell me exactly what you did approve," I said.
"Clara."
"Exactly. Walk me through it. Every transfer. Every period."
"I approved budgets before your mother got sick," he said. "Quarterly reviews. Capital spending. Normal business."
"And after she found the money moving?"
"Nothing new. She brought me fragments. I told her to wait."
"After the surgery?" I said.
"Nothing."
"After we buried her?"
He flinched at the word buried.
"Nothing," he said. "I withdrew from operations entirely. I did not go to the offices. I did not open Helena's reports. For months I could barely get out of bed."
"Did you sign anything?"
"Papers Walter brought to the house. Hospital papers. Insurance forms. I told you, I signed unread."
"Did any of them say transfer?"
"I did not read them," he said, and his voice broke. "God forgive me, I did not read them."
"So these could be yours and you would not know," I said.
"No," he said, too fast. "These entries span a full year. I was not authorizing vendor payments from my kitchen table. Someone continued this as if I were still in my office."
"Or someone needed it to look that way," Greer said.
Thomas turned on him. "Do not help me, Martin."
"I am not helping you," Greer said. "I am helping her."
The laptop clicked.
All three of us looked at it. The frozen frame shivered, and the video resumed on its own, as if it had been waiting for us to finish accusing each other.
Grace looked directly into the camera.
"If Thomas is watching this with you, understand something," she said. "He is not the person who hurt me. But he is the person who helped them."
Thomas made a sound I had never heard from him before.
Grace continued, calm and terrible. "No one forced his silence. No one had to. He chose it to protect the company, and that silence is exactly what they needed. Silence was the help."
"Dad," I whispered.
He had covered his face with both hands.
On the screen, Grace softened slightly. "Thomas, if you failed me, it was because you believed you were protecting our family. I know that. But someone used that weakness. Someone counted on it."
Then, in the old recording, someone knocked.
Grace turned toward a door we could not see. The color left her face.
She leaned close to the camera and lowered her voice. "If anything happens to me, Clara, do not trust the person who tells you they saved you."
The screen went black.
No one moved.
In the silence I heard other voices from this long night. Walter had saved Thomas from seeing her body. Walter had saved the company from collapse. Greer had saved the hotel from lawsuits, eleven times.
Saved. Saved. Saved.
I opened my mouth to say it out loud.
Behind us, the hidden door, which none of us had touched, began to open slowly.
A shadow fell across the floor.