Chapter 3: Breakfast With the Enemy

Madeline's POV

Nathan's kitchen smelled like coffee and morning light and the very faint ghost of whatever his housekeeper had made for dinner the night before.

He was already at the island when I arrived, his laptop open, a cup of coffee steaming beside it, reading something on the screen with the focused expression he wore when he did not want to be interrupted. I helped myself to a mug from the cabinet, because I knew where the cabinet was now, and poured my own coffee, and sat across from him without waiting to be invited.

That was the thing about Nathan. You never needed to wait to be invited.

'How do you think it went?' he said, without looking up.

'Better than expected,' I said. 'Sandra Ng will be talking about Cross Industries to her husband before the week is out. The Cho brothers are already skeptical about the development project. And three of the board members I identified caught my name tag and registered it. That's the seed. Now we let it grow.'

'And Jeremy?'

I wrapped both hands around my mug. 'He noticed.'

'Of course he noticed. Half the room noticed. You walked in like a verdict.'

'I walked in like a business associate at a professional event,' I said.

Nathan finally looked up from his laptop. He had a way of looking at me sometimes that was too direct to be comfortable, like he was not performing the social courtesy of looking slightly away. 'Madeline. You walked in wearing the color of a declaration of war to the engagement party of the man who sent you to prison. Let's not pretend it was just business.'

I held his gaze. 'Everything I do is business.'

'Everything you do is personal,' he said, not unkindly. 'The business is just the vehicle.'

I did not respond to that. I drank my coffee and looked out the window at the harbor, which was blue and distant and indifferent, which was what I needed it to be this morning.

'Walk me through the timeline,' I said.

He accepted the redirect without comment, which was another thing I appreciated about Nathan. He knew when to push and when to let something sit. He turned the laptop to face me, and I leaned in.

The plan had four stages.

The first was reputation. Vivienne Lau had spent five years building herself into the story of Havenport's success. She was the face of Whitman Corp's public image, the profile in lifestyle magazines, the woman whose name appeared in charitable foundation press releases. That reputation was real, but it was also manufactured, and manufactured things have seams. We were going to find the seams.

The second was financial. There were accounts, ones I had spent eighteen months tracing with Nathan's resources and the help of a forensic accountant who owed Nathan a very large favor, that told a story. Not Vivienne's story. The real one. We were not ready to go public with it yet, but we would be.

The third was the board. Whitman Corp's board of directors had eight members. Two of them had always been quietly uncomfortable with the direction Jeremy had taken the company. One had a personal history with Nathan that predisposed him to listen. That was three votes. We needed four.

The fourth stage was the one I thought about the least and the most. Jeremy himself.

'You're quiet,' Nathan said.

'I'm reading.'

'You finished reading two minutes ago.'

I looked up. 'The Jeremy stage,' I said. 'It's the most unstable variable.'

Nathan leaned back in his chair. 'Because you still love him.'

'Because he's unpredictable,' I said. 'He has access to resources we don't control. If he decides to fight back before we're ready, it could compromise stages two and three.'

'That's not what I said.'

'It's what I answered,' I said, 'so let's move on.'

Nathan looked at me for a moment, and then he did move on, because he was smart enough to know which hills were worth dying on and which ones belonged to me.

Dara arrived at nine fifteen with a pastry bag from the bakery on Crane Street and the expression she wore when she had information she was not sure how to deliver.

I had learned to read that expression years ago. 'Just say it,' I told her, before she had even sat down.

She dropped into the chair beside me and opened the pastry bag and extracted a croissant and tore it in half with unnecessary force. 'You remember account seven?'

'The Cayman shell.' I set my mug down. 'The one Vivienne used to move the planted funds.'

'It's still active.'

The kitchen went very quiet.

'How active?' Nathan asked.

'There was a transaction four days ago,' Dara said. 'Forty-two thousand, moved from an account in Singapore to account seven and then distributed to three separate end points.' She pulled a folded paper from her coat pocket and slid it across the island. 'I had Marcus run the trace. The Singapore account is registered to a holding company. The holding company has one director.'

I looked at the paper.

I read the name.

I read it again.

'Eleanor Whitman,' I said.

Dara tore another piece off her croissant. 'Jeremy's mother.'

The silence stretched. Nathan was looking at the paper too now, and I watched him put together what I was already putting together, which was that this changed the shape of everything.

I had believed, for four years and eleven months, that Vivienne Lau had acted alone. She had the motive, the access, the personality for it. It had always been enough.

But Eleanor Whitman.

Eleanor, who had never pretended to like me. Who had told Jeremy, once, in a conversation he had faithfully repeated to me, that I was not the kind of woman a Whitman married. Who had been impeccably polite to my face for twelve years and perfectly consistent in her quiet campaign to make Jeremy see that I was insufficient.

Eleanor had funded it. Eleanor had signed off on destroying me.

'Madeline,' Dara said quietly.

I realized I had been staring at the paper for a very long time.

'I'm fine,' I said.

'I know you are. That's not what I was going to say.' She looked at me steadily. 'Are you going to be able to do this? Knowing it was her too?'

I thought about the cell block at Havenport Correctional, about the sound the door made when it closed, about the first night and the second night and every night after that when I lay on a cot and stared at a ceiling and asked myself how I had ended up here and the answer was always Jeremy and now the answer was also his mother.

'Absolutely,' I said.

And I meant it, which was the part that scared neither of them but should have scared me.

Because the woman who walked into that gala last night had patience and composure and a plan, but what I felt sitting in that kitchen looking at Eleanor Whitman's name on a piece of paper was older than patience. Older than composure.

It was rage. The kind that has been sitting still for five years, waiting to be given a direction.

I had just given it one.

'We need to revisit the timeline,' Nathan said, already reaching for his laptop. 'If Eleanor is involved, we have leverage we didn't know we had. And that means we can accelerate stage two.'

'Not yet,' I said.

He looked at me.

'If we move too fast, she'll know we found the account. She'll close it, destroy the trail, and we'll have nothing.' I picked up the paper, studied the account numbers once more, and set it down. 'We let it sit. We watch it. And we wait for her to use it again.'

'And in the meantime?'

'In the meantime,' I said, 'I have a shareholders' lunch to prepare for.'

Nathan nodded slowly.

Dara ate her croissant.

I looked out the window again at the harbor, and somewhere across this city, in a building with his name on it, Jeremy Whitman had a card with my number on it, and I wondered if he had slept last night.

I wondered if I wanted him to have slept.

I decided I did not care.

I decided that, and then I spent the rest of the morning deciding it again, which should tell you something about how much I had actually decided it.