Chapter 14: The Wallet That Never Came Back

“Did the guard scan the card, or type the number?”

Grant stopped scrolling. “That’s the right question.”

“Then give me the answer.”

He tapped through three screens. “Manual entry. The desk system has a field for it when a scanner fails. Someone read the number aloud, and the guard typed it.”

“So nobody held my license at that desk.”

“Nobody has to have. They only needed the digits.” He turned the tablet toward Lex. “Which means the person who walked in didn’t need your wallet, Miss Roswell. They needed your file.”

My file. I stood in that cold corridor and heard the F train again, the screech of it, the vending machine dinner, the three days of begging the DMV clerk to believe I was me. That clerk had wanted proof. Records. Copies.

“Harden House mailed my records to the registrar that week,” I said. “Mrs. Doyle sent everything. My old license was in there. She’d photocopied it when I aged out.”

“Who else could have asked for those copies?” Lex said.

“That’s what I’m going to find out.”

He studied me for a moment, then looked at Grant, who had gone pink to the ears. “Guard’s name?”

“Pavel, sir. I’ll have him written up for…”

“You won’t.” Lex said it mildly. “The system offered him a manual field. Someone gave him a number that looked right. Pavel did his job. Ask him tomorrow what the visitor said, and be kind about it.”

Grant blinked, then nodded. I noticed it and filed it away.

Lex poured water from a pitcher on the corridor table and slid the glass toward me. “You’ve been holding that page for ten minutes.”

I looked down. I had. I drank.

“I’d like you to stay out of Meridian until my lawyers have formal access,” he said.

“I’d like to eat dinner at a reasonable hour. We don’t always get what we want.”

“Lilly.”

“I’m not storming anything, Lex. I know that’s a gift to their lawyers.” I put the glass down. “But if I wait for Monday, Meridian has a weekend to tidy up. What if Dana sends the formal request tonight, Grant pulls the manual-entry audit from the desk system, and I tell you which Marlowe papers to demand? I typed half of them.”

Something shifted in his face, small and quick. “That’s better than my plan.”

“That’s usually how plans improve.”

“Don’t gloat. It’s unbecoming in a witness.”

Dana called while Grant was drafting. She had read the preservation letter twice and called it “polite enough to survive a courtroom and rude enough to scare an accountant.” Then she came to Thursday.

“If you walk into Fox Holdings alone, Ryan’s people call it participation. So you walk in with me, with a written notice already delivered to the bank that you dispute any claim you authorized Marlowe’s debt. And you ask for the documents first. If he refuses, you leave.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s the whole fight. Don’t give him a speech. Give him a form.”

I laughed, short and tired. “Fine. A form.”

Lex took me to a quiet office on the thirty-ninth floor and left me alone with a phone and a cup of tea he hadn’t asked about. It was nearly nine. I called Harden House anyway.

Mrs. Doyle answered on the third ring, her kettle already whistling. “Lilly? Is something wrong?”

“A little. I need to ask about my file, the week I turned nineteen. You mailed it to the registrar.”

“I did, dear. Friday, after you came home so upset.”

“Did anyone else ask for a copy before that?”

The line went quiet. A drawer opened and closed on her end. “Now that you mention it. A man phoned that Monday from a hospital records office. Said you’d requested your birth documents and he needed your intake papers to match them.”

My skin went cold. “I never requested anything.”

“I thought it was odd, but he sounded so official. I sent him a copy of your whole folder, license and all.” Her voice dropped. “I’m sorry, love. He gave his name. Walter.”

“Pryce?”

“I believe so.”

I thanked her and hung up before she heard my voice change. Helen had handed me that name in a Southampton study like a gift. I turned it over now and wondered who it was meant to protect.

Lex found me at the window. I told him all of it. He listened without interrupting, which I’d begun to realize was its own form of respect.

“Pryce ran the records office at St. Anne’s,” he said. “Helen told you that herself.”

“Which means either she’s confessing a little, or she’s pointing me at the wrong door.”

“Or both.”

Grant knocked and came in with the tablet held flat against his chest, like it might spill. “Sir. Miss Roswell. I cross-checked the Marlowe notary entry against the date on her wallet report.”

“And?”

“The Queens notary logged your license number on a Tuesday.”

I did the math before he finished. “I lost my wallet on Thursday.”

“Yes, Miss Roswell.”

The window glass was cold against my fingertips.

Someone had my license number two days before it ever went missing.