Six

Grayson crossed the study first and shut the door, even though the gala noise sat two floors and a marble staircase away. Only then did he turn around.

"Sit down," he said.

"I don't want to sit down. I want you to tell me what you know about my father."

"Sit down. Please."

She sat, mostly because her knees had gone unreliable somewhere around the word Duvall. Grayson pulled a chair around to face her instead of putting his desk between them, and she noticed that without knowing yet what to do with it.

"My father ran Cole Maritime for thirty years before I took over," he started. "There was a cargo accident nine years back. A ship went down off the Carolina coast, lost most of its load, two crew members hurt badly enough that it made the papers for a week. Duvall Shipping was the contractor responsible for the loading manifest."

"My father worked loading manifests. For a company out of Marseille that partnered with American firms." Her voice held steadier than she felt. "He died two months after that accident. Heart attack, the doctors said. My mother always said it was stress, not his heart."

"The official report blamed Duvall Shipping for a loading error that overweighted the vessel." His jaw worked once before he kept going. "It ended his company inside a month."

"He didn't make loading errors. He checked everything three times over. I used to fall asleep on the floor of his office listening to him recheck manifests out loud like it was a bedtime story." Her hands had curled into fists in her lap without her noticing. "Are you telling me your company destroyed my father over something he didn't do?"

"I'm telling you I don't know yet." He held her eyes, and whatever else he was, in that moment he wasn't lying to her. She'd have staked something on it. "I was twenty-five. My father ran everything. I signed whatever landed in front of me and stayed out of the legal side. I never once heard the name Duvall until Diane said it downstairs tonight."

"Convenient."

"I understand why you'd think that." He didn't flinch away from it. "I'll pull the file myself. Tonight, if I have to."

She sat with that a long moment, the gala music thumping faintly through two floors of marble and money, trying to decide whether the man in front of her was telling the truth or was simply very good at sounding like it.

"Why would Diane know," she said finally, "if it's buried the way you say it is?"

"Because Diane makes it her business to know things that could hurt me later." His mouth twisted. "I should've expected her to have this loaded before tonight even started."

They didn't go back down to the gala. Grayson sent word through his assistant that Mrs. Cole had a headache, true enough that Marielle didn't argue the lie, and the car took them home through a silence that had its own weight.

Theo was already asleep, curled up with the stuffed dinosaur tucked under one arm. Marielle stood in his doorway a long moment, watching him breathe, before she felt Grayson stop behind her in the hall.

"I meant what I said. I'll find out everything. Tonight."

"I want to see the file myself. Whatever you find."

"You will." A pause stretched longer than it needed to. "Marielle. For what it's worth, and I know it might not be worth much right now, I'm sorry. Whatever my father did or didn't do, it cost you something that mattered."

It was the first time he'd sounded less like a man managing a crisis and more like a person who'd actually noticed her as one. She didn't trust it yet, but she noticed it, the way you notice weather shifting before you can name what kind.

"Go find your file," she said, and went into her own room before he could see whatever her face was doing about that.

She lay awake a long time, listening to his study door open two rooms down, the low hum of a computer, papers moving. Somewhere past two she heard him swear, low and sharp, the kind of sound a man made when the ground under him gave way.

She was at his study door before she'd decided to get up. He looked up when she knocked, and his face told her something had broken before he'd said one word.

"What did you find?"

He turned the laptop toward her. A scanned document, old, the header barely legible. "The original inspection report," he said. "Before the version that went to the insurers."

"And?"

"It says the overweight cargo was loaded exactly to Duvall Shipping's specifications. No error on your father's end at all." His voice had gone flat in a way she hadn't heard from him before, not the controlled flat, something closer to shaken. "The fault was mechanical. A ballast system Cole Maritime had been warned about eighteen months before and never fixed."

The room went quiet enough to hear the pool filter running outside.

"Someone changed the report," she said.

"Someone changed the report," he agreed, "and blamed a dead man's company because it didn't have the money to fight back, and Cole Maritime did."