CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

It was Wednesday evening when she stumbled upon the piece of evidence, but it did not come to her in an earth-shattering manner at all. Instead, it was one of those confirmations that come in such a quiet, specific way if you have been patient enough: something that you have half-known and is now completely visible.

She was working in the library then. The Morelli penthouse had a library which was something she had discovered only in the second week and had quite immediately decided to use by herself as a secondary workspace for the times when the studio room's intense concentration felt like the last straw and she needed to think more generally. It had a nice amount of daylight and a very comfortable writing chair along with bookshelves that held the crazy mix of Marco's business books, Elena's novels, and Adrian's architectural monographs, which is pretty much the whole story of a family; it had everything you wanted to know about a family.

She was doing the collection brief notes, trying to keep herself warm in the writing chair with the reading lamp on and a cup of tea gone cold, when she suddenly caught Roman's voice through the corridor.

She only did because his door was not completely shutsomething that she had seen quite a few times about Roman, that he was so careless with doors that it was as if he was either not caring at all about the fact that he might get overheard or he had perfectly calculated, and rightly so, that carelessness was a way of doing innocence-performance. She was not quite sure which one yet.

She heard her name spoken aloud.

The particular aspect of hearing your own name in a voice which had not yet tallied you as a possible listener was a unique and distinguishable sound she heard it and she instantly froze in the writing chair, collection notes on her lap, cold tea on the table at her side, and she did not move.

"the wife is not going to be the most significant obstacle, " Roman was talking. His voice had a completely different tone from the one he was using at the dinner table less friendly, more business-oriented, the voice of a person deeply engaged in the task. "She is quite sharp but she does not have any independent financial means. At least not yet. If we act before the second trimester is over"

A long silence. He was on the phone.

"I have only been shown the access code on two occasions. I will need two more days to verify it and then the board documents in the study will be available. The financial irregularities in the Morelli Group's Hong Kong subsidiary"

Yet another silence.

"Anderson, hearing you on the timeline. If we step on this too quickly I am telling you there are risks which we have not yet identified. If Adrian gets wind of it before the meeting"

She ceased picking up sound right after the name.

Anderson.

That name was familiar to her from her mother's journal. She had marked it twice in the ledger a distant connection, a name that had come up in the financial records her mother had kept, a person whose link to the events her mother had been dealing with was not clear yet.

For ten seconds, she remained seated. One minute, please.

She re-arranged mentally the pieces of information she had just received in the way most helpful to her. Afterward, she fetched her phone and typed out verbatim what she had heard, complete with time and date and the audio direction his room, northeast corner of the corridor then she sent it to her private investigator's encrypted email, CCed herself, and also saved it to a cloud folder that she had specifically set up for this kind of documentation, because her mother had taught her that even after death, a record is the foundation of everything.

Another 15 minutes she spent in the library as she was afraid that her immediate departure might be heard and indeed she needed the corridor to be clear. After that, she visited Adrian's study.

Quarterly reports were spread on his desk where he was hard at work. An unusual Wednesday evening sighting got him to look up at her when she came in. She shut the door, then stood at the other end of the study looking at him with the full weight of the terrible news she was about to share. "I've got to tell you this, " she said. "You're going to have to listen to all of it before you respond, because my reply is going to be rather difficult and I want you to have the complete picture before you have it."

Without raising his voice, he told her, "Come, tell me." He closed the file and put his hands on the table. 

Across the room, the chair creaked under her weight. Out spilled every detail the conversation on the line, the phrases caught between static, that single word: Anderson. Her fingers tapped the table as she mentioned how it appeared in her mothers files not once, but two times. Then came Marianna's notes, followed by her own findings stacked beside them. Two full weeks passed since she first questioned whether something tied those brakes failing to the rest. Sound came in. He stayed quiet. Not once did he cut in. Stillness held his features  not empty, yet shaped by restraint, like someone holding back a flood from spilling into words. The silence around him felt heavy on purpose. After she stopped speaking, silence settled between them, lasting much longer than expected. "Anderson, " he said. "Christopher Anderson. Christiana's father. "You know him." "He was a business associate of my adoptive father's. He stopped. Something moved through his face. "And of my biological father's. Marco told me, years ago, that there had been a significant falling-out. Money. A failed partnership. He did not know the details and I did not ask." "I think the falling-out was more than a failed partnership, " Aria said carefully. "I think Anderson has been building toward something for a long time, and I think Roman is part of how he is building it." Again, Adrian fell silent. Watching him settle beside it the huge weight she saw how he handled big things by shrinking them down first, making room to begin. Then came the slow work of building back up. "I will speak with Roman tomorrow,” he said.

"Not tonight?"

"Tonight I have to figure out what exactly he was talking about in the board papers and see what kind of traces of his misdeeds might be there before I even talk to him. If I come to him with not enough facts, he will control the talk and I'll get to know less than I want."

She raised her eyes to him. "You are actually doing this as a bargaining tactic, aren't you?"

"I will deal with it as a matter of fact, " he stated. "It is a case, where I have a much better idea than the other side, and the right thing is to find out more before I reveal what I already know."

"That is exactly what my mother did, " she shared. "For months."

"Your mother was very smart, " he commented.

"Yes, " she replied. "She really was."

He fixed his eyes on her through the study. The lamp was between them. The bookshelves. He had put aside the reports which would wait.

"Thanks, " he said. "For being there. For not pushing me to open up before you were ready. For opening up to me now."

She looked up. Then she got up. "Go to the board documents, " she instructed. "I'll prepare tea."

"You don't have to"

"I know I don't have to, " she said. "I am simply going to."

She brewed some tea. She delivered it to the study and put it on the table, then came back to the library, picked up her notebook and continued to work, as the work was always there and the work always waited, and presently work was the best thing she could do with her hands while everything else arranged itself.