Chapter 12: What Mother Signed

I wanted to hate my mother for what was written on those pages, and the strangest part was that I couldn't.

I stood in the cold light of the vault, staring at the neat, rounded signature that I had once traced on a village windowsill with my finger, trying to learn how a mother's name looked. Elias didn't say anything. He only closed the ledger gently, as if it might bruise, and set it back on the table between us.

"Open the envelope, Miss Tessa," he said at last. "Your grandfather wrote it for this moment. I think he knew."

My hands were still shaking when I broke the seal. The letter inside was two pages long, written in his small, slanting hand, and the first line made my throat close.

"My little river, if you are reading this, then you have found your mother's signature, and you are hurt. Please read on before you judge her."

I read it standing up, with Hollis near the door and Mrs. Aldous quietly pretending to adjust a drawer at the far end of the vault.

"Miriam signs what Gregory puts in front of her because she has been afraid of him for eighteen years. I do not excuse her for it. But on the night you were taken to the village, she came to my study at three in the morning, still in her hospital gown, and asked me to promise that I would bring you home when I could. She has been waiting for me to keep that promise ever since, and I am sorry I ran out of time. If you cannot forgive her, I understand. But please do not decide it from a page of numbers."

By the end, the words had blurred. I pressed the back of my wrist against my eyes and breathed out slowly, trying not to cry in front of a banker.

"She asked him to bring me home," I said, and my voice came out thin. "She asked, and he never did."

"He was waiting for you to be strong enough," Elias said gently. "He was wrong to wait, but I never doubted why."

"And she still stood on that roof and chose Lydia."

"Perhaps because Lydia has had eleven years to make sure she would," Hollis said quietly from the doorway.

I looked up. He had spoken almost to himself, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. Lydia's fog, the cold, slippery thing that slid over my mind in my last life, had been working on my mother for over a decade. I had been angry at her for choosing wrongly, but I had never asked how much of that choice was truly hers.

It didn't excuse her. But it cracked something I had thought was solid.

"We should decide what to do about Moreau," I said, folding the letter carefully and tucking it into my pocket beside the pendant. "It's almost ten, and I don't want to hand over the real ledger. Not before I understand what's in it."

"Mrs. Aldous has a copier in the back office," Elias said. "A good one. I can make a full duplicate of every page in an hour."

"And the flash drive?"

"Likely a digital copy, with the bank statements." He lifted it from the box and closed his fingers around it. "If the originals are in the court's custody and the safe's contents are gone, this may be the only complete record left in the city."

I thought about it for a long moment. "Then here is what we do. Elias, copy everything. Make two duplicates of the ledger, and make one of them wrong. Change the numbers on a few key pages so that it looks real but leads nowhere. That is what we give to Moreau."

Elias raised an eyebrow. "That is a risky game, Miss Tessa."

"So is leaving a seventeen-year-old girl in his hands." I met his eyes. "But we don't hand over anything until I know where Nell is and that she is alive. I want proof, and I want the exchange somewhere with witnesses."

"Moreau does not give proof," Hollis said. "He gives orders."

"Then he'll learn that I don't take them."

For a heartbeat, I saw something flicker across Hollis's face, a rough, startled pride, and it warmed me more than any compliment could have. Elias only nodded, tucked the ledger under his arm, and turned toward Mrs. Aldous.

"We will need your copier, madam, and your discretion."

"You will have both," she said, folding her hands. "Mr. Walter paid me well for the second, and I would have given it free for the first."

We spent the next hour in a windowless back office that smelled of toner and old paper, while Elias copied every page of the ledger and marked the ones he would alter. I stood at his shoulder with the flash drive in my palm and tried to read the columns of figures. Most of them meant nothing to me. But I could see the pattern in the dates, the quiet monthly transfers growing larger and larger over seventeen years, each one stamped with the same two signatures. I looked at my mother's name over and over, and each time it hurt a little differently.

When we finally climbed the marble stairs again, it was a quarter past eleven. Elias carried a leather briefcase in one hand, and Hollis walked half a pace ahead of me, as always, his eyes sweeping every corner. The upper floor was strangely quiet. The doorman who had greeted us so stiffly earlier was gone from his post, and the lobby was empty, and Mrs. Aldous, who had walked ahead of us, stopped dead in the middle of the marble floor.

Her face had gone white as paper.

"Mr. Grant," she whispered. "The doors."

Hollis's hand went to the inside of his jacket. I followed his eyes. The great brass doors at the front of the bank were shut, and behind the glass, in the pale noon light, two broad-shouldered men in dark coats stood with their backs to us, blocking the entrance.

In the middle of the lobby, in a low leather armchair that had not been there an hour ago, a man sat with one ankle crossed over his knee. He was perhaps sixty, with silver hair combed neatly back, a gray suit that must have cost more than my whole village, and the lazy, unhurried smile of someone who had never in his life been asked to wait.

I had never seen his face before. But I knew his voice before he opened his mouth.

"Miss Halvorsen," said Anton Moreau, lifting a hand in greeting. "I do dislike waiting until noon."