They Raised the Wrong Girl, So Five Brothers Came for Me novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Read the Other Column

I should have put the phone under the pillow.

Instead I held it in my hand, and Finbar woke up, warm and heavy against my back, and said, "Who is it?"

"A broker," I said. "Nothing."

"Moth," he said, reading the screen over my shoulder.

His voice had gone quiet in a way I hadn't heard before.

"That's mine," he said. "That's the report I've been waiting on."

He took the phone out of my hand, gently, and sat up against the headboard with the sheet at his waist.

I sat up too and pulled the quilt over my chest.

I had written that report on Tuesday, and I had written it to be useless.

It said Greywater was a retired shipping lawyer in Wilmington, Delaware, who had died in March, and that his accounts were run by an estate nobody could find.

A clean dead end, signed off in the plain way I signed everything.

He read it once, and his thumb stopped on the last line.

"Read the other column," he said aloud.

The room was very quiet.

"Greywater put that in the margin of the Toledo vote two years ago," he said. "One line, in the proxy filing. Read the other column."

I said nothing.

"I never told anyone. I kept the page in my desk." He turned his head. "Moth has signed off with it on a report to me."

"It's a common phrase."

"Hattie."

"Finbar."

"It is not a common phrase."

I could have lied.

I had a very good lie ready, about a freelancer's shared habit and a forum where Moth had trained, and I looked at his face and couldn't use it.

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