Chapter 2

The next morning, Elizabeth’s interview appeared across every major financial outlet in River City.

Dressed in a white suit, she stood in front of a backdrop that read: [Bring Every Child Home.]

Her eyes were red, just the right amount.

“My brother, Jensen, fell into the river by accident when he was five.” She looked straight into the cameras. “We never stopped looking for him for all these years.”

In the video, she covered her mouth and paused for two seconds. “If he’s still alive, I’d like him to know that his sister has been waiting for him all this time.”

The comments were flooded with tears almost instantly.

People called her strong and resilient. Others accused me of using my wealth and influence to bully a woman who was simply trying to find her missing brother.

Her PR team launched a campaign called ‘Women Support Women in Business,’ and dozens of prominent entrepreneurs reposted the missing-person poster.

The boy in the poster wore a blue shirt. The photo was blurry. His face was erased by the river and the passage of time. The shirt matched the river rescue report down to the last detail.

[Personal belongings: blue cotton shirt.]

Thirty minutes after the poster went live, I received a private message from Elizabeth’s team. They politely asked whether I would be willing to repost it to show some support for their charitable campaign and help preserve everyone’s dignity.

I did not respond. A second message arrived soon after.

[Mr. Lowe, public opinion is turning increasingly against you. Ms. Spencer is willing to give you an opportunity to explain yourself.]

I stared at those words and let out a chuckle.

Twenty years ago, they never gave me a five-year-old child the chance to ask why he had been pushed into the river.

Twenty years later, they wanted me to lend credibility to her carefully crafted charitable image.

I took a screenshot of both messages and handed them to Henry Newton for the records.

“Don’t release them yet.”

Henry looked at me. “Why?”

“Let her play out the charade a little longer.”

The more one lied, the harder one would fall.

That afternoon, Marcus gave an interview. “If our brother is still alive, we will find him. The Spencer family is prepared to put up ten million dollars for a search fund.”

I glanced at the screen and smiled.

Ten million dollars was far more than the hush money they had paid the river rescue station back then.

Reporters were waiting outside the company’s building.

“Mr. Lowe, did you maliciously withdraw from the bidding because you’re jealous of the Spencer siblings?”

“No.”

I stopped in my tracks.

“Then do you know Jensen Spencer?”

“Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

I looked directly into the cameras. I did not answer.

That silence was exactly the answer they wanted.

That evening, three of our business partners emailed me, carefully asking whether they should put their joint projects with me on hold.

Mr. Zane called to persuade me. “The public backlash is already gaining momentum. Just apologize, reopen the bidding, and give everyone a way out.”

I replied, “A way out is for people with nowhere left to go. I’m still standing.”

“But Elizabeth has already gotten three industry associations to speak on her behalf.”

“Which ones?”

Mr. Zane gave me the names. Two were associations Elizabeth had funded for years. The third was a foundation where Marcus served as a figurehead director.

Their statements were beautifully worded. They said commercial competition should never come at the expense of charitable causes. They said a missing-person fund should never become collateral in a battle over corporate interests.

When he finished, I asked Mr. Zane just one question. “Who built the office buildings those associations work out of?”

Silence filled the other end of the line. “The Spencers.”

“So they’re not here to play peacemaker. They’re here to pay back a favor.”

I turned off the speakerphone.

“Pull every contract linking them to the Spencer family. Don’t release anything yet. Seal the files.”

Elizabeth was exceptionally good at wrapping favors in the language of righteousness. I would simply peel those layers away, one by one, until everyone could see whose money was buried underneath all that virtue.

After hanging up, I opened the private investigator’s report.

The first page contained only two photographs. One was a river rescue station from twenty years ago, and a medical clinic at a riverside construction site that had since been demolished.

The final page of the report read: [The person who rescued the boy may still be alive.]

I pulled that page from the file. Elizabeth wanted to bury the truth beneath a missing-person campaign. In that case, I would look for the evidence behind the cameras she knew best.

I did not sleep that night.

I laid out every public interview Elizabeth had given over the past twenty years and arranged them chronologically.

She said they never stopped looking for their brother seven times. Yet before establishing the search fund, she had never once released a missing-person notice containing his complete identifying information.

She also mentioned that her family was her greatest weakness three times.

However, after our parents died, the first thing she did was transfer the inheritance share that should have remained under my name into Marcus’.

None of those statements were evidence, but they were threads.

Once you caught hold of a thread, you could start pulling the whole thing apart, one piece at a time.