Chapter 20: Five A.M.

Elias's POV

I heard every word of it on a pair of earbuds in the pantry, with a waiter's tray balanced on my knee.

I had bought the microphone in a hardware store and wired it into the smoke detector myself.

That was two weeks earlier, on a night I could not sleep.

I had told myself it was a long shot.

At the end, when Leopold said he wept at the funeral, I put the tray down and put my forehead against the pantry wall.

My father had been right.

Eighteen years, and he had been right from the first photograph.

Then I copied the file to three drives.

I put one in my shoe, one in the housekeeper's apron, and one under a loose tile in the garden shed.

At four in the morning the house was dark.

Leopold had gone to bed after one o'clock.

At eleven he had put the ledger back in the safe himself.

He trusted that room more than any other in the world.

I knew, because I had watched the camera feed on my phone.

The study door was locked, but the housekeeper had a master key and she had never been asked to give it back.

I turned the dial of the safe in the dark.

The month, the day, the year of the merger.

The door swung open.

Under the gray ledger lay a second thing that had not been there when I looked at the safe last month.

It was a manila envelope, thick, with pink ribbon around it.

The name on the front was in Adelaide's hand: C.P.

Inside was a bank draft stub for fifteen thousand dollars, made out to a garage, and a note on a hotel card.

Done. Tell him I won't speak of it again.

It was signed with a mechanic's initials.

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