Backstabbing Friend's Self-Inflicted Shame novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Last Friday

In her father's office Greer opens the safe, finds his last floppy disk and sees the real share register, and Valeria arrives with soup and tears; then a stranger texts that Valeria is his wife.

The night guard at Haldane Home signed me in at ten to midnight and asked if everything was all right.

"Wonderful," I said. "Long dinner."

My father's office was on the third floor, at the end of the hall past the sample room.

I had not changed anything in it since the funeral.

His reading glasses were still on the blotter, folded over a legal pad with his handwriting on it.

The safe stood behind the framed photo of the first factory, and it opened to my mother's birthday.

Inside were the deed to the building, a roll of old stock certificates, and a stack of grey plastic squares held together with a rubber band.

Floppy disks.

My father had never trusted a company he could not hold in his hand.

Every Friday for twenty years he had copied the books onto a floppy, and every Friday the staff had teased him for it.

He kept the latest twenty in this safe and sent the older ones to the cellar.

I took the top one off the stack.

It was labelled in his square capitals: SHARE REGISTER, BEFORE THE RESTRUCTURE. FOR GREER ONLY.

The date on it was the last Friday of his life.

I had been in this office a hundred times since, and I had never once looked in the safe.

Tate had said it only held paper.

His old computer sat on the credenza under a dust cover, a beige tower with a slot on the front that no one had touched in years.

I pulled the cover off and pressed the power button.

It groaned, then started.

The disk went in with a small click.

The file opened in a plain grey window with columns of names and percentages.

Greer Haldane, 51.

Tate Burrell, 12.

The rest was the board and the early investors, and a column of dates that ended in my father's last Friday.

I opened my tablet and logged into the board portal.

The register Tate kept for the directors said Greer Haldane, 34.

It said Harmon Ventures LLC, 17.

I read the line three times.

I did not know what Harmon Ventures was.

I did not need anyone to tell me whose name it was.

Seventeen percent of my father's company had gone out of my name and into a friend's, and somebody had signed the pages that moved it.

I took a photograph of the screen with my phone, then another of the tablet beside it.

The stairwell door opened down the hall.

Heels on the carpet, quick and light.

I knew the walk.

"Greer?"

Valeria came around the corner in a soft green cardigan with her dark curls pulled back and a paper bag held against her chest.

Her eyes were red.

She had been crying hard and recently, and it suited her.

"The guard said you'd come up," she said. "Oh, honey. Oh, I'm so sorry."

She set the bag on the desk, and the smell of chicken soup filled the office.

"It's from the deli on Division. I didn't know if you'd eaten."

I had not eaten.

"That was not me," she said. "I swear it wasn't. My phone's been doing strange things for weeks, and I think someone got into it. I would never, Greer. You know I would never."

"Where was Tate?"

"On my couch, with a migraine. I went to get him water." She took a breath. "I came straight here to tell you."

She stepped around the desk with her hand out.

"You're shaking. Let me hold your tablet, I'll put it down."

The screen still showed the register.

"No, thank you," I said.

Her hand stopped in the air.

For half a second her face did nothing at all.

Then it crumpled again, warm and wet, and she said, "Of course. Of course you're upset."

"Is it the good chicken soup?"

"It's the one you like."

"Thank you for bringing it," I said, and smiled at her.

I came out from behind the desk and took her by the elbow, gently, the way I had a hundred times since college.

I walked her to the door.

"Go home, Valeria," I said. "Get some sleep. We can talk Monday."

"Greer, please. Let me stay with you."

"Monday."

She went.

I watched her heels all the way to the stairwell, and I locked the office behind her.

Then I sat down at my father's desk and ate the soup.

It was very good.

I took the floppy out of the old machine and slid it into the inside pocket of my coat, against my ribs.

My phone buzzed on the blotter.

The video of my stage had been posted to three accounts, and the first had three hundred thousand views.

Under the notifications was a text from a number I did not know.

The woman who sent you that photograph is my wife.

Her name is not Valeria Harmon.

Call me before she does.

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