Chapter 15

Elena had the security footage pulled from three nearby businesses by ten a.m., laid out across three monitors in Cole Capital's private security office, Weston pacing behind her chair like a man who hadn't sat still since the diner.

"There," Elena said, freezing a frame. "Partial plate, grey sedan, parked on Essex for eleven minutes before you all arrived and gone within ninety seconds of Rosalind leaving. Whoever this is, they're not amateurs."

"Can you trace it?"

"Already did. Registered to a private investigation firm — Halloway & Cross, out of a mid-town office that mostly handles corporate due diligence. Discreet. Expensive. The kind of firm you hire when you don't want your name anywhere near the paper trail."

Claire leaned over Elena's shoulder, studying the grainy still. "Who hired them?"

"That's where it gets complicated." Elena pulled up a second window — a corporate filing, dense with the kind of legal boilerplate designed to obscure rather than clarify. "The retainer was paid through a holding company. R.C. Holdings. Registered eleven years ago, dormant ever since, until a payment cleared three weeks ago — right around the time the acquisition went public."

Weston stopped pacing.

Claire watched the color drain slowly out of his face, the same way it had the night Eleanor's name had first come through on her phone.

"R.C.," he said, quiet, almost to himself. "Robert Cole."

"Weston, your father hasn't left Fairview in three years," Elena said carefully. "He can barely form full sentences on his good days. You told me yourself the stroke left him—"

"I know what I told you." His voice had gone sharp, brittle, something dangerous simmering just beneath it that Claire had never heard from him before. "I know exactly what the doctors said. I've been paying for that facility for three years out of my own account, making sure he has round-the-clock care, visiting every month even though he doesn't always know who I am when I walk in — and you're telling me his name is attached to a private investigator following my fiancée to a diner in the Lower East Side?"

"I'm telling you what the filing says," Elena said gently. "I'm not telling you what it means."

Weston pushed away from the desk hard enough that his chair rolled back into the wall, and for a moment Claire saw something in him she hadn't seen before — not the controlled fury from the boardroom, not the quiet devastation from the night Eleanor called. Something closer to panic, raw and unfamiliar on a man built almost entirely out of control.

"Someone's using his name," he said, pacing again, faster now. "Someone has access to accounts that should have been frozen when he lost capacity. Edmund. It has to be Edmund — he's had three decades to learn exactly how to bury a transaction behind a name nobody would think to question, and my father's name is the one name in this entire mess nobody would ever suspect of hiding anything, because everyone already assumes he's—"

His voice cracked. He stopped mid-sentence, both hands braced against the edge of the desk, breathing hard.

Claire crossed the room without thinking and put a hand flat against his back, feeling the tension radiating off him like heat off pavement.

"Weston."

"I spent three years telling myself the worst thing my father ever did to me was lie about my mother," he said, voice rough, barely holding together. "I don't know what to do if it turns out he's still finding ways to hurt people from a bed he can barely sit up in."

"Then we find out the truth," Claire said, steady, even though her own pulse was hammering. "The same way we've found out everything else. Carefully. Together. You don't have to carry this alone, remember? You told me that yourself, two nights ago."

He turned to look at her, something raw and grateful flickering across his face before the mask started, slowly, deliberately, sliding back into place — not to shut her out, she realized, but because it was the only tool he had left to keep functioning in a day that had just handed him one more thing he didn't know how to hold.

"Elena," he said finally, voice steadier now. "I want a visit scheduled at Fairview. Today. And I want to know exactly who's had access to any account under my father's name in the last five years — every signature, every power of attorney, every single person who's had reason to touch anything with his name on it."

"On it." Elena was already typing, but she paused, glancing between the two of them with something unreadable. "Weston — if it does trace back to Edmund, if he's been operating under your father's name this whole time, you understand what that means for the board. For the vote. For everything."

"I understand exactly what it means." Weston's jaw tightened, the last of the panic folding itself back down into something colder and far more dangerous. "It means Edmund Harcourt didn't just destroy my mother's life and hollow out Claire's father's company. It means he's been wearing my own father's name like a mask for years, and I am done letting him hide behind people who can't speak for themselves."

Claire's phone buzzed in her pocket. She almost ignored it — until she saw the name on the screen, and every ounce of resolve in the room went suddenly, dangerously quiet.

**Edmund Harcourt:** *I hear you've been busy this morning. We should talk before you do something you can't undo. Dinner. Tonight. Bring your husband — I think it's time the three of us finally had an honest conversation.*