Chapter 16: The Signature

Ansel's POV

I left Emme at the kitchen table with her lawyer and two detectives, and I drove to see a man I had promised not to see.

Harold Wray's lawyer lived over a hardware store, and he opened the door before I knocked.

He was eighty, and he had been waiting four years.

"You promised him you'd only come if she asked," the old man said.

"She asked on Friday. In a hallway, in front of the elevators."

"What did she say?"

"That I left him alone to die."

He shut his eyes for a moment.

Then he went to a desk, unlocked the bottom drawer and took out a thin envelope with my name on it in Harold's shaky hand.

I read it standing up.

*Ansel. If you are reading this, Emme has finally got angry enough to ask.*

*Good. It means she is alive.*

*I signed you out of the company because Dalton showed me an audit with your name on it.*

*Forty million in padded invoices. He had forged every page.*

*He said he would send it to the district attorney unless I made you resign quietly.*

*I knew you would fight it, and I knew you would lose. A man with a conviction cannot build boats or anything else.*

*So I signed. I told myself I would fix it before I died. I ran out of time.*

*Do not come to me at the end. He will use it.*

*Look after her when she is ready to be looked after, and not before.*

I read the last line twice.

I folded the letter and put it in my coat.

"There's more," the lawyer said. "I kept the call log from the hospice. Harold phoned you on the last Tuesday. You drove forty minutes."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Perfect Husband's Darkest Secret from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.