CHAPTER 83: Robert Laine

POV: Avalon Pierce

Margaret came to them at the foundation office because that’s where they were when she called back with more and she said she needed to show them rather than tell them.

She arrived at nine AM  the next morning with a box filled with letters in envelopes, some yellowed at the edges, organized with the care of someone who had kept them deliberately rather than just never thrown them away.

She set it on the desk and sat down.

Selene was already there. Maya had come too, not because anyone had asked, but because she’d arrived for work and read the room and stayed without discussion.

“Robert Laine,” Margaret said. “He and Nene met in 1974. He was a corporate attorney while she was just starting the company. He was the one who helped her structure it correctly from the beginning.”

“Were they—” Selene started.

“No, I don’t believe so.” Margaret looked at the box. “They were close in the way of two people who understood each other’s work completely. That kind of intimacy.”

“What happened to him?” Avalon said.

“He died in 1987.” Margaret looked at him. “Three months after your father.”

The office was quiet.

“He knew about Whitmore?” Avalon said.

“Read the letters,” Margaret said. “I’ve marked the relevant ones.”

He read them slowly.

Selene sat beside him and read with him, neither of them speaking.

The early letters were professional. Nene and Robert discussing the company structure allocations, the governance framework she was building from scratch. His handwriting was neat and considered, hers was smaller and faster and occasionally impatient.

As the years passed the letters changed.

More personal and more direct. 

Then 1985.

Robert wrote about concerns he had about a business relationship Jonathan Pierce had entered into. 

The name Whitmore, appearing for the first time.

**I’ve looked into Whitmore as you asked. What I found is not definitive but it is troubling. He has a pattern of partnerships that end badly for everyone except himself. Jonathan should be careful.**

Nene’s response was not in the box.

Only Robert’s side of the correspondence.

But her side was visible in his responses to her. In the way he answered questions she’d apparently asked. 

The last letter was dated November 1987.

Six weeks after Jonathan Pierce’s death.

**Lorraine. I need you to listen to me carefully, I know what you’re thinking and what you want to do with what we’ve found. But remember you have a grandson who is eight years old and you are the only thing standing between him and a world that has already taken more from him than it should. The evidence will be kept. It will still be evidence in ten, twenty or even thirty years. But Avalon cannot afford to lose you the way he lost his father, Please, let us keep him safe.**

Avalon read the letter twice.

Then set it down on the desk.

“He told her to wait,” Selene said quietly.

“Yes.”

“He told her the same thing she told Catherine. The same calculation.” She looked at the letter. “Protect the child first.”

“And then he died,” Avalon said. “Three months later.”

Margaret looked at her hands. “His death was ruled a heart attack. He was sixty-one at the time and it wasn’t implausible.”

“But,” Selene said.

“But the timing,” Margaret cut in simply.

The office held the weight of it.

Avalon looked at the letter.

The evidence that was kept, exactly as Robert said it would, until a federal prosecutor in 2024 put Gerald Whitmore in a cell.

“He was right,” Avalon said.

“Robert?” Margaret said.

“Yes, about  the evidence keeping.” He looked at the letter. 

Maya spoke for the first time since Margaret arrived.

“Two people told her to wait,” Maya said. “Two people she trusted, and both of them died within months of each other, then she waited anyway alone for thirty years.”

The room was very quiet.

“She was extraordinary,” Selene said.

The same words Avalon had said weeks ago standing at his study window.

“Yes, she was.”Margaret said. 

He walked for an hour after.

Alone.

San Francisco did what it did. Indifferent and reliable.

He thought about Robert Laine dying three months after Jonathan Pierce.

He thought about the calculation of a woman who had lost her son and her closest friend in three months and had chosen to survive both losses and build something that outlasted them.

He thought about eight-year-old Avalon who had no idea.

Who had gone to school and grown up and built a company and built walls and spent ten years being excellent at being alone and none of it with any knowledge of what was being carried on his behalf.

He stopped at a coffee shop. A few people were inside, just the ordinary Tuesday routine in the city.

He went in.

Sat at the window.

Thought about what he'd do with the thirty years of other people’s sacrifice.

Not guilt, he wasn’t going to carry it as guilt, that would waste it.

Something else.

He chose responsibility and honor, by building something worth the protection.

That was all.

He called Selene from the coffee shop.

She answered immediately.

“Where are you?” she said.

“Coffee shop, two blocks from the office.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m okay.” He looked out the window at the street. “Robert Laine told her the evidence would keep, that protecting me was the priority.” He paused. “I keep thinking about what it means to be the reason someone waited.”

Selene was quiet for a moment.

“It means you owe it something,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you're already paying it.”

He looked out at the street.

“Come back when you’re ready,” she said. “We’ll be here.”

He finished the coffee he didn’t want.

Sat for a few more minutes.

Then headed back to the office