What Her Father Knew

Chapter Nine

The article was worse than the headline promised. Wren read it twice in the back of a cab, Theo's folder clutched in her lap like it might slip away if she loosened her grip, and felt something in her chest go cold with every paragraph.

Sourced to an unnamed "individual close to the company." It painted Alaric as calculating, vindictive, a man who allegedly told colleagues off the record that acquiring Ashby Communications wasn't enough, that he wanted the Ashby name broken beyond repair. No mention of the merger collapse fifteen years ago. No mention of the leak. No mention, unsurprisingly, of Camille Renard's name anywhere in the piece.

It was, Wren realized, a story built to protect exactly one person by sacrificing two others.

"She's fast," Theo muttered, scrolling his own phone, grim. "Faster than I expected. She had this written and waiting. She just needed an excuse to publish."

"The photograph," Wren said. "Of me leaving the club. That's the excuse."

"Maybe. Or she's been planning this regardless and the photo just moved up the timeline." He glanced at her, apologetic. "I'm sorry. I should have brought you this weeks ago, when I first found it. I kept telling myself I needed more proof before blowing up my sister's whole life."

"You did the right thing today," Wren said, and meant it, even through the fear tightening in her chest.

She had the cab drop her at her father's house instead of her own apartment, Theo's folder still against her chest, eighteen months of careful distance from Desmond Ashby collapsing under the weight of what she needed to ask him now.

Her father answered the door in the cardigan he'd worn every evening since his company collapsed, looking older than sixty-one, and the second he saw her face, whatever polite greeting he'd been about to offer died in his throat.

"Wren. What's happened?"

"I need you to tell me the truth," she said, stepping past him, "about the Vale merger. About Camille Renard. About whatever happened fifteen years ago that you've let me believe was something else entirely."

Her father went still in the doorway, and in the long silence that followed, Wren watched eighteen months of careful evasion crack open on his face.

"Sit down," he said quietly. "Please."

She sat. He didn't, choosing to stand near the window with his back half-turned, the posture of a man bracing for a confession he'd clearly rehearsed many times and never said out loud.

"Fifteen years ago, my firm managed public relations for a merger between the Voss family's shipping company and a larger logistics conglomerate," he said. "A junior associate on our team, Camille Renard, though she went by a different name professionally then, had access to confidential merger documents as part of her role coordinating between our office and the Voss family's legal team."

"And she leaked them."

"I believe she did. I've believed it a long time. Never had proof that would hold up publicly, but I had enough internal evidence, timing, access, a pattern that didn't add up, to be reasonably certain the leak that killed that merger came from inside my own firm. Through her." He turned to face her fully, shame written across his features. "I didn't report it."

"Why?" The word came out sharper than she meant, eighteen months of grief finally finding a target. "Why would you protect her?"

"Because reporting it meant admitting my firm had a catastrophic security failure at the exact moment we were managing one of the most sensitive deals of our career. It would have destroyed our credibility with every client we had. I told myself I was protecting the firm. I told myself Camille was young, that she'd made a mistake she'd learn from, that quietly letting her resign was punishment enough." His voice cracked. "I told myself a lot of things, Wren, because the alternative was admitting I'd chosen my own reputation over doing what was right, and I wasn't capable of living with that version of myself."

Wren felt something in her chest crack open, grief and anger tangled so tightly she couldn't tell where one ended. "Alaric Voss believed you leaked that information yourself," she said quietly. "He built an entire acquisition strategy around punishing you for something Camille did, and you let him believe it, the same way you let everyone believe it, because admitting the truth would have cost you something."

"I didn't know he believed that. Not until your company started facing acquisition interest eighteen months ago. By then admitting the truth felt like it would only look like a desperate excuse from a man who'd already lost everything."

"It might have saved everything," Wren said, voice breaking. "If you'd said something fifteen years ago, or even eighteen months ago, none of this, the acquisition, the club, the mask, none of it happens the way it did."

Her father sat heavily across from her, the confession seeming to physically diminish him. "I know," he said quietly. "I've known for a long time my silence had a cost. I just didn't understand until this moment how much of that cost you'd end up paying instead of me."

Wren opened Theo's folder with hands that had finally stopped shaking, and slid the correspondence across the coffee table toward him.

"I need you to look at this," she said, "and tell me if it's enough to finally end this. Because right now a completely different lie is circulating publicly, and it's about to destroy the one person who's actually been trying to get to the truth."

Her father scanned the pages slowly, expression shifting from confusion to recognition to something that looked, finally, like real resolve. "This is enough," he said quietly. "Combined with what I already know, this is more than enough."

His phone buzzed before either of them could say anything else, an unfamiliar number lighting the screen. He glanced at Wren, uncertain, before answering.

"Desmond Ashby," he said cautiously.

Wren watched her father's face change in real time. Confusion, then alarm, then something close to fear, as the voice on the other end spoke.

"That's not possible," he said into the phone, standing abruptly. "She wouldn't—" He stopped, listening, knuckles going white around the phone. "I understand. Thank you for telling me."

He hung up slowly, turning to Wren with an expression that dropped her stomach through the floor.

"That was a contact of mine at the courthouse," he said quietly. "Camille Renard just filed an emergency restraining order against Alaric Voss. She's telling a judge, right now, that he's been threatening her into silence for weeks, and she's naming you, Wren, as evidence of exactly how far he's willing to go to protect himself."