Eight

The investigator's name was Renata Cho, and she called four days later with a voice that gave nothing away about whether the news was good or bad.

"I found your ballast records," she told Grayson, on speaker so Marielle could listen from across the desk. "There's an internal memo dated eighteen months before the accident, flagging the exact mechanical fault that caused the cargo shift. It's signed off by your father, marked resolved. It wasn't resolved. Nobody ever fixed it."

"Who covered it up after the accident?"

"That's where it gets complicated." Papers shuffled on her end. "The falsified report that blamed Duvall Shipping was filed by someone with executive-level access to the legal file room. Someone who wasn't your father."

"Who, then?"

"Your brother. Julian Cole approved the final version six weeks after the accident, right before it went to the insurance company and the press."

Marielle watched Grayson's face move through several stages at once, disbelief, then something colder settling behind his eyes. "Julian was twenty-two. Fresh out of business school. He didn't have authority to approve anything that size alone."

"He didn't act alone. There's a second signature on the approval chain, half-obscured, matching your father's assistant at the time, a man named Harold Reyes. He died four years ago, so we can't ask him." Renata's tone stayed clinical, the voice of someone who delivered bad news for a living and had made peace with it. "But the timeline's clean. Your brother signed off on burying the mechanical fault and blaming a subcontractor with no money to sue you back."

Grayson ended the call and sat very still, staring at nothing, long enough that Marielle finally reached across the desk and put her hand over his.

"He was a kid," she said, not sure if she was defending Julian or just trying to soften the blow for the man across from her. "Twenty-two, scared, probably terrified of what your father would do if the company took a hit that size."

"That kid destroyed your family." His voice had gone rough. "And he's sat across from me at board meetings for six years pretending none of it happened."

"Does he know you're looking into this?"

"He will soon. I'm not sitting on it." He looked at her, and whatever had shifted in him since that morning in the kitchen had gone harder now, more decided. "I'm confronting him today."

She almost told him to wait, to think it through, to consider what a family scandal would do to a custody case still in motion. But his jaw told her there was no version of him that would sit on this even one more night, not now that it touched her father's name.

Julian arrived within the hour, and whatever confidence he'd walked in with lasted exactly as long as it took Grayson to slide the falsified report across the desk.

"Explain this," Grayson said.

Julian's face went pale, then worked hard at arranging itself back to casual. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Your signature's on the approval chain. Eighteen months before the accident, there was a flagged mechanical fault. Nobody fixed it. Six weeks after the ship went down, you signed off on a report blaming an innocent contractor instead."

"I was twenty-two." Julian's voice cracked, the first honest sound he'd made since walking in. "Dad told me to sign it. Said the company couldn't survive the liability if the fault came from us, that hundreds of jobs were on the line, that Duvall Shipping was already going under and it wouldn't change anything for them."

"It changed everything for them." Marielle's voice came out sharp enough that Julian's eyes cut to her like he'd only just registered she was in the room. "My father died two months later. My family lost everything. And you knew, this whole time, and let me sit at dinner with you like nothing happened."

Julian's mouth opened and nothing came out for a long moment. "I didn't know your name was Duvall until Diane mentioned it at the gala. I swear to you, I didn't connect it until then."

"But you knew what you'd signed," Grayson said, quiet in a way that landed harder than shouting would have. "You knew for nine years, and let me build this company thinking our father's worst sin was being cold. Not this."

Julian's face crumpled, whether genuine or the last resort of a man caught with nowhere left to run, Marielle couldn't tell. "What are you going to do," he asked, "now that you know?"

Grayson looked at Marielle instead of answering right away, some question passing between them she couldn't fully read. When he finally spoke, the room went still around the weight of it.

"I'm going to make it public. All of it."