CHAPTER 58: The Name

POV: Avalon Pierce

He called Diana at 1:07 AM.

She answered before the second ring, which meant she’d been sitting with her phone, waiting, and that alone told him something about what she was about to say.

“Talk,” he said.

“The name the prosecutor has.” A pause. “Gerald Whitmore.”

Avalon said nothing.

“He’s been in the California State Senate for twenty-six years,” Diana said. “Before that he was a private investor and a business partner with your father in the early nineties. He was one of the three men your father was building a case against when he died.”

“One of three.”

“The other two are dead. Natural causes both. Whitmore is seventy–one, still sitting, voting, and chairing the financial oversight committee.” Another pause. “The committee that oversees companies like Pierce Holdings.”

Avalon stood at the kitchen counter in the dark and let that become real.

A man who had possibly ordered his father’s death had spent twenty-six years sitting on the committee that regulated the company his father built. He had been in rooms with Nene, probably shaken Avalon’s hand at some industry event he couldn't place.

“Does he know the prosecutor has his name?” he asked.

“Not yet. They’re moving carefully. A sitting senator requires a specific process and they don’t want to give him time to build a defence.” Diana’s voice was steady. “They’re asking that nobody outside this conversation knows for seventy-two hours.”

“Why tell me at all?”

“Because your mother gave them the name as it concerns your father and you deserved to know before a headline told you.” She stopped. “Also because Whitmore knows about Pierce Holdings, Avalon. He’s known about the company for years. If he finds out the investigation has his name before the prosecutor is ready, you and Selene could be at risk.”

“What kind of risk?”

“The kind that comes from a desperate man with significant resources and everything to lose.” She paused. “Be careful for the next seventy-two hours.”

He thanked her and stood in the dark kitchen for a long moment after hanging up.

Then he went back to Selene.

She was still awake.

She read his face before he sat down and straightened slightly in the way she did when she was preparing to receive something difficult.

He told her everything.

She listened without moving, and when he finished, she was quiet and said “Your father died for this?” 

“Yes.”

“And this man has been sitting on the committee regulating your company for twenty-six years.”

“Yes.”

“While knowing what he’d done.”

He didn’t answer because there was nothing to add.

She looked at the dark window across the room.

“Does Catherine know his name?” she asked.

“She gave it to the prosecutor herself.”

“How is she?”

The question surprised him. Not because it was wrong, but because of its genuine quality. 

“Tired,” he said. “Smaller than I remember but okay.”

“Did you two actually talk?”

“As properly as we’ve ever managed.” He leaned his head back. “She asked me to go rest and I stayed because I wasn’t ready to leave.”

Selene put her hand on his arm. “Seventy-two hours,” she said. “What do we do?”

“We act like nothing has changed while something very significant has changed. We don’t go anywhere alone. We tell nobody, not Maya, Margaret or Thomas.”

“Thomas might already know.”

“Maybe but we won't confirm it.”

She nodded.

They sat with it together for a while.

“Your father would have been fifty-eight this year,” Selene said quietly.

He looked at her. “How do you know that?”

“I looked him up months ago after you first mentioned him.” She kept her gaze forward. “I wanted to know who he was.”

“What did you find?”

“Someone who couldn’t look away from wrong things. Every article, every person who remembered him said the same thing. That he was the kind of man who saw something incorrect and couldn’t leave it alone.” She paused. “You’re like that.”

Avalon said nothing.

“Even when everything between us was complicated and transactional and difficult, you kept choosing correctly. It kept coming out of you whether you meant it to or not.” She finally looked at him. “That’s him.”

He felt proud and closer to his father.

He’d spent twenty-eight years with a photograph and the story of a car accident on a wet road.

Now the story had a different shape entirely because it was murder and somehow more bearable because it had meaning. His father hadn’t died for nothing, he had died because he couldn’t look away from something wrong.

That was a life with a spine running through it.

“Thank you,” he said.

She just held his arm.

They stayed on the couch until nearly 3 AM, then went to bed, as he lay in the dark, thinking about a man he’d never known who had apparently given him the most important thing he had.

The inability to look away.

He was almost asleep when Selene spoke.

“Avalon.”

Something in her voice brought him fully awake immediately.

“What?”

“The car outside.” She was looking at the window. “It’s been there since we got home.”

He sat up.

A dark sedan at the curb below. It had no plates visible from this angle, engine off but exhaust still faintly rising.

Someone is sitting inside.

Watching.