Chapter 6 - The Son Evelyn Had Stopped Believing
Colin came to the condominium that evening.
He brought no flowers.
No dramatic apology.
He brought a cardboard file box.
Evelyn looked at it.
“What’s that?”
“Every stupid financial conversation Mara and I had for the last year.”
He set it on the kitchen table.
Colin had been fighting with Mara over Cross Ridge Holdings for months.
Evelyn knew that part.
She did not know why.
“She kept telling me distributions were down because commercial rents were soft,” Colin said.
“They were.”
“Not enough to explain the drop.”
“You never showed me numbers.”
“I tried.”
“You yelled at Thanksgiving and called her a thief.”
“She was acting like one.”
Evelyn stared at him.
“That is not how you persuade people.”
“I know.”
There was no defensiveness in the answer.
That unsettled her more than another argument would have.
Colin opened the box.
Emails.
Monthly reports.
Two sets of operating summaries.
One from the company’s internal accounting software.
Another Mara had circulated to family shareholders.
The totals did not match.
Not dramatically.
Three thousand here.
Eleven thousand there.
Twenty-two thousand in “development consulting.”
Amounts small enough to disappear inside a company worth tens of millions.
“Where did you get the internal numbers?”
“A project manager copied me by mistake.”
“And you never told me?”
“I tried. You told me Mara had managed finance for fifteen years and I managed mulch.”
Evelyn remembered saying it.
She had meant it as a joke.
Colin had not laughed then either.
He leaned back.
“I stopped pushing because every time I questioned her, you assumed I wanted money.”
“You usually did.”
“I know.”
There was his part of it.
Years of borrowing had taught Evelyn to hear self-interest whenever Colin spoke.
Years of reliability had taught her to hear competence whenever Mara did.
Both assumptions had become shortcuts.
Colin rubbed his palms together.
“The week before you were taken, Mara called me.”
“What about?”
“She wanted to know if you’d said anything about an outside audit.”
Evelyn looked at him sharply.
“What did you tell her?”
“That you’d threatened one before.”
“Did you tell her about Monday?”
“No.”
That mattered.
Evelyn’s paper calendar contained the appointment.
Mara had also been in the home office three days before the kidnapping.
She claimed she was dropping off tax forms.
Evelyn remembered something else.
Mara had stood beside the desk while asking whether Monday morning was free for breakfast.
May you like
At the time, Evelyn had thought nothing of it.
Now she knew her daughter could have seen the calendar without opening a single drawer.
