in this room,” she murmured.
Vincent felt an unfamiliar discomfort that had nothing to do with temperature.
He had expected greed.
He had not expected kindness.
Then a phone vibrated.
The maid froze.
She retreated toward the window before answering in a whisper.
“Dad?”
Vincent listened.
A pause followed.
Then she said the words he had been waiting to hear.
“No, I still haven’t told him who I really am.”
Vincent’s breathing nearly changed.
So she was lying.
The satisfaction lasted less than three seconds.
“I know what they did to you,” she whispered.
“I came here to prove you were never the thief.”
Vincent’s eyes remained closed, but everything inside him sharpened.
The woman said something else after listening to her father.
“No.
I haven’t found the ledger.
And I’m not stealing anything to get it.”
The ledger.
Eight years earlier, during the investigation into missing funds from Moretti Imports, one accounting book had disappeared.
Vincent remembered his father raging about it.
Without that original ledger, the internal financial records appeared to point directly at Daniel Ellison.
Ellison had been dismissed, publicly disgraced in their business circles, and threatened with prosecution.
No criminal charge was ultimately filed because the records were incomplete, but the accusation had destroyed his career.
Vincent had been thirteen when Daniel Ellison first came to work for his father and twenty when the scandal exploded.
He had accepted the explanation everyone gave him.
Ellison stole from us.
Now the man’s daughter was standing ten feet away from a fortune in cash and refusing to touch it.
“If the proof is here, I’ll find it,” she continued.
“I’ll photograph it, call Mr.
Brennan, and let the lawyers handle it.
I’m not becoming what they said you were.”
Another pause.
Her shoulders lowered.
“I love you too, Dad.
Get some sleep.”
She ended the call.
For several seconds she did nothing.
Then she approached Vincent again.
He expected her to leave.
Instead she looked down at him.
“Whatever happened to you,” she whispered, believing he could not hear, “it must have been terrible if you have to leave money around just to learn whether people are decent.”
Vincent’s throat tightened.
She adjusted the blanket.
“And for what it’s worth, Mr.
Moretti, some people can be frightened of you and still refuse to betray you.”
She reached for her cleaning bucket.
Vincent opened his eyes.
The bucket slipped from her fingers.
A bottle rolled across the carpet and stopped beneath a chair.
The woman’s face drained of color.
Vincent sat upright.
She took one step backward.
He could have called security.
He could have demanded answers.
Two weeks earlier, he would have done both before she managed another breath.
Instead he said, “Mara Ellison.”
Her expression confirmed it.
Vincent looked at the objects on the coffee table—the obscene little display he had created to expose her character.
Then he looked at the woman whose character he had just insulted.
“How long have you known?” she asked.
“About your name? Since yesterday.”
Her eyes shifted toward the door.
“I’m not going to run.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You were pretending to sleep beside an open wallet and the key to your archive.”
Vincent had no defense worth offering.
“Yes.”
Mara laughed once, but there was no humor in
