CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Isabella's POV

The two-week report landed in every inbox on the forty-first floor at four o'clock on Thursday.

Six names. Six numbers.

Brad Kessler, plus one point eight percent. Kyle, plus one point five. Owen, plus one point two. Pete, plus zero point nine. Tobi Adeyemi, plus one point one.

Isabella Whitmore, minus three point one percent.

The floor did not laugh out loud this time. Nobody needed to. I heard every laugh inside every head.

Told you. Solar.

Three weeks, tops, and she's gone.

Poor little charity case.

I opened my own notebook under the desk and ran my finger down the column I kept for myself.

Plus two point zero percent.

I read the figure twice. Then I read the report again.

Minus three point one.

Somebody was lying, and the somebody was not me.

***

I had kept a private record of every trade since my first morning on the floor. Date. Time. Security. Quantity. Price. The broker's confirmation number. I wrote every line by hand in the evening and checked each line against the broker's emails before I slept.

In my first life, nothing I did ever carried my name. Not one acquisition. Not one model. Not one late night. Adrian signed everything, and I owned nothing, not even proof.

Never again.

So I did what I should have done in my first life a thousand times. I compared the paper.

On the left of my screen, Blackwood's internal trade blotter. On the right, the independent confirmations from the broker, emailed straight to me after every execution.

Line by line. Trade by trade.

Most of them matched.

Seven did not.

Seven trades on Blackwood's system showed worse prices than the prices I had paid. A few cents here. Half a dollar there. On ten million dollars, a few cents were enough to turn a gain into a loss.

I clicked on the first bad entry and opened the amendment history.

Amended 23:42.

The second.

Amended 23:42.

All seven. Three different nights. The same minute every time.

Eleven forty-two at night.

Nobody on this floor worked until eleven forty-two. Nobody honest, anyway.

My hands had gone cold. I tucked them between my knees and made myself breathe.

Then I picked up my mug and walked the long way round to the kitchen.

I passed Brad's desk first.

He was laughing at something on Kyle's phone. His thoughts were not laughing at all.

Seven trades. He said nobody checks the broker side. He said a nudge, nothing more. A nudge. So why do I feel sick?

I kept walking.

Simon's glass office came next. He sat with his feet up on his desk, reading the two-week report on a tablet while wearing the smile of a man in a warm bath.

Minus three. The chairman sees minus three, loses interest by Christmas, and my floor goes back to normal.

I filled my mug at the coffee machine and walked back to my desk.

I knew the answer now. Brad had changed the trades. Simon had told him to.

And I had no way on earth to explain how I knew.

Your Honour, I heard their thoughts.

No.

So I would do what I always did. I would build the case on paper, line by line, until the paper said everything out loud.

Timestamps. Login records. Broker confirmations. Every trading system on the planet kept a log of who touched what and when. Blackwood's was no different. Analysts had access to the audit trail for their own portfolios. Nobody ever read the audit trail, because nobody ever needed to.

I needed to.

I printed every page, slid the pages into a plain folder, and put the folder in my laptop bag.

***

At six, the floor emptied around me.

Tobi Adeyemi stopped at my desk on her way to the elevators. She did not look at me. She simply adjusted the strap of her bag and spoke under her breath.

“Tuesday night. I stayed late to finish a model. Brad was sitting at your terminal after eleven.”

I looked up.

Her eyes stayed on the elevator doors.

“I didn't tell you,” she said. “If Simon asks, I didn't tell you anything.”

Her thoughts were tight with fear.

There goes my job. There goes Mummy's rent. Why did you open your mouth, Tobi? Because Brad's a cheat, and you're tired of watching cheats win.

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

She was already walking away.

I watched her go and made myself a promise. One day, when I had something of my own, Tobi Adeyemi would never again sit in a meeting while a man repeated her ideas louder.

I would remember this favour.

***

At home, I kept the trouble to myself.

Dinner was at seven. It was Margaret's soup and roast chicken. Eleanor was asking about my day and Richard Blackwood was asking about the bond market.

Nathaniel waited until dessert to talk to me. 

“How's the challenge?”

“Fine.”

He looked at me across the table. It was a long look. Steady. Patient. It was the look of a man who read balance sheets for a living and knew when a number was hiding something.

I held his gaze and said nothing else.

If I told him, he would fix everything by morning. Simon would be gone before lunch. Brad would be gone before Simon. And every analyst on the forty-first floor would know the charity case had run home to her husband.

He watched me a moment longer. Then he nodded once and let the answer stand.

I was more grateful than I knew how to say.

***

At one in the morning, I gave up on sleep.

I padded downstairs in my socks through the dark house, past the lamp in the front hall, towards the kitchen. I wanted warm milk…and I wanted the damn folder out of my head.

The kitchen light was on.

Nathaniel stood at the sink in his grey T-shirt, eating cereal out of a mixing bowl.

He froze with the spoon halfway to his mouth.

We looked at each other.

“You didn't see this,” he said.

“See what? The chairman of Blackwood Holdings eating children's cereal over the sink?”

He glanced at the box on the counter. A cartoon bear in sunglasses grinned up at us.

“The bear has excellent fundamentals,” he said.

I laughed out loud in response.

He took a second bowl from the cupboard, filled the bowl, added milk, and slid the bowl along the counter to me. We stood side by side at the sink and ate in silence, sharing the box, passing the milk.

The house slept around us. The clock above the stove ticked. Somewhere upstairs, a pipe knocked once.

When he finished, he set his bowl down and turned to me.

A drop of milk clung to the corner of his mouth.

I reached up and wiped the drop away with my thumb before I thought about what I was doing.

He went still.

So did I.

My thumb stayed where the drop had been, at the corner of his lower lip. His skin was warm. His breath touched my wrist. I felt the exact moment his eyes dropped to my mouth.

I did not move my hand.

He leaned in. Slowly. So slowly I had all the time in the world to step back.

I did not step back.

His face was an inch from mine. I closed my eyes.

“Antacids,” a voice suddenly muttered from the doorway. “Where does Margaret hide the blasted antacids?”

We jumped apart so fast I hit the counter with my hip.

Richard Blackwood stood in the kitchen doorway in a tartan dressing gown, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He looked at Nathaniel. Then he looked at me. Then he looked at the two bowls and the box with the bear.

His thoughts arrived in a rush.

Oh. Oh! Well. Good heavens. The antacids will keep.

“Second drawer on the left,” Nathaniel said, without looking at his father.

Richard Blackwood crossed the kitchen, opened the second drawer on the left, took out a small bottle, and walked back to the door with enormous dignity.

At the door, he paused.

“Carry on,” he said. Then he winced. “I mean. Goodnight.”

He disappeared.

I pressed my hand over my mouth. Nathaniel stared at the ceiling. Neither of us looked at the other.

“I should go to bed,” I said.

“Yes.”

I fled.

***

The next morning, Simon's assistant met me at the elevator.

“Mr. Leach would like to see you in his office. Now, please.”

I walked across the floor with my laptop bag on my shoulder and the folder inside the bag.

Simon sat behind his desk. In the second chair sat a woman in a grey suit with a notepad on her knee and an employee lanyard around her neck. Human Resources.

Simon smiled and gestured to the empty chair.

“Please, Ms. Whitmore. Sit.”

I sat.

“We've found irregularities in your trades,” he said gently. “You're out of the challenge.”