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C6
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2026-08-30 06:52:03Chapter 6
Her Father’s Handwriting
Her aunt’s voice faded as she moved down the hall. Ivie waited until she couldn’t hear anything at all, then left the building without speaking to anyone.
In the car she sat for a moment before she told the driver where to go. “The house,” she said and the driver took her to her father's house
The study smelled like him. She hadn’t expected it. Nearly a year, and no one had aired the room out or packed away what didn’t need to stay. The leather chairs still held the shape of him. The cologne was mostly gone, but not completely. She stood in the doorway longer than she meant to before she made herself walk in.
She hadn’t come looking for anything. The rest of the house felt like it belonged to other people now. This room still felt like his.
His photograph sat on the corner of the desk the way it always had him on the terrace in Cornwall, squinting into the sun, one hand half raised as if he’d been about to wave someone off when the shutter clicked. She picked it up.
“Daddy.” she whispered the word. She cleared her throat. “I don’t even know where to start.”
She sat on the edge of the desk, the frame in both hands.
“Damien and Sophia, the two people that I trusted with all my life.” She tried to hold the years forming in her eyes and sniff.
“They’ve been planning something. For a long time, I think. I heard them at the party talking about the company, about me, like I was just something they were waiting to get past.” She blinked hard. “Sophia stood up at my engagement dinner and said she’d never seen two people more right for each other. I believed her.”
She wiped under her eye with the back of her hand, quick, irritated at herself.
“And then it was everywhere. Phones out before I even left the room. There was already a story online before I got home that I imagined the whole thing, that I couldn’t handle the pressure.” A short breath escaped her, not quite a laugh. “Now Edmund’s taken me off everything. Sat me down in that boardroom with people who’ve known me since I was a child, and not one of them looked at me. Aunt Priscilla voted with him without blinking.”
She stopped. Pressed her lips together.
“I heard her on the phone after. She sounded happy about it.” Her thumb moved along the edge of the frame without her noticing. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now, she cleans the remaining tears left.”
She sat there for a while, looking at her father's picture, imagining if he could answer her now, tell her what to do or everything will be fine. Then she set the photo down, wiped her face with both hands, and stood up, walked behind the desk and sat in his chair, It was too big for her. It had always been too big, even when she was small and used to spin in it while he worked until he told her to stop before she made herself sick.
Her hand found the edge of the drawer before she’d decided to open it.
Inside were the things no one had bothered to sort. A fountain pen he’d stopped using years ago because the nib had gone soft. Reading glasses in a case that still carried his initials pressed into the leather. A photograph of her mother, young, beautiful, laughing at something outside the frame. Ivie had never seen it before. She looked at it for a second, then set it face down and kept going. She didn’t have room for one more thing right now.
Under a stack of old correspondence she found a ledger.
It wasn’t unusual on its own. Her father had always kept things on paper as well as in the system an old habit from before everything went digital. She almost closed it without really looking. Then she recognized the handwriting on the inside cover, small, slanted, the way he wrote when he was thinking instead of presenting. She wanted to keep it open a little longer just to look at the shape of his letters.
She opened it properly.
Pages of figures, dated a little over two years back. Nothing dramatic at first. Numbers next to short labels, some she recognized, some she didn’t. She ran her finger down a column out of habit, the way she used to when she reviewed reports for him.
Halfway down the third page, something didn’t add up.
She stopped. Went back to the top and checked again, slower. A transfer, dated, with a figure that didn’t correspond to anything she recognized from the company’s public filings for that quarter. She knew those filings. She’d helped prepare parts of them herself, back when she still had a desk on the fourteenth floor and people still told her things.
She flipped forward, looking for the same entry somewhere else, some reference that would make it fit. It wasn’t a huge sum not enough to be an obvious scandal but it was specific enough that it should have shown up. A line item. A reference number. Something.
Nothing.
Maybe a personal loan, she thought. Something for a relative that never made it into the company’s usual language. People kept things off the books for reasons that had nothing to do with wrongdoing. She wanted that to be true. She sat there wanting it.
It didn’t come.
She glanced at the photo again and thought, not for the first time that day, that there were parts of him she’d never been let into.
She turned the page, half expecting the next one to explain the last. The entries simply continued, calm and orderly. The handwriting never hesitated, as if the person who wrote them had no reason to think anyone else would ever open this book.
Something in the drawer creaked when she went to set the ledger down. That was when she noticed it a slight gap between two of the middle pages, like something had been slid between them and left long enough to leave an impression.
She opened to the gap.
A torn piece of paper sat wedged there, smaller than her palm, ragged along one edge. Most of it was blank, or close to it a few numbers cut off mid-digit, half a line of handwriting that stopped before it meant anything.
One word survived whole, near the torn edge, in the same slanted hand as the rest of the ledger.
Archive.
Ivie sat with the scrap between her fingers. The study was quiet around her. Her father’s
chair was still too big beneath her, the way it had always been.
Último capítulo
The Vows we broke C7
Chapter 7Maria’s WarningArchive.Ivie sat with the scrap between her fingers. The study stayed quiet. Her father’s chair was still too big under her, the way it always had been.She stayed until the light outside had gone. She turned the paper over once, then again, as if the blank side might give her something the other hadn’t. It didn’t. Eventually she folded it small and slipped it into her coat pocket.She left the house and took a cab to Sterling Holdings. She didn’t go inside. She asked the driver to leave her in the underground garage and sat for a while, looking up at the building, wondering if the answers were somewhere behind those walls.Her phone buzzed as she got out of the car. A text from a number she didn’t recognize.Can we talk? Somewhere quiet. Not inside.She almost ignored it. Then another message came through.It’s Maria. From records. It’s about your father.Ivie stood by the elevator, the cold
The Vows we broke C6
Chapter 6 Her Father’s HandwritingHer aunt’s voice faded as she moved down the hall. Ivie waited until she couldn’t hear anything at all, then left the building without speaking to anyone.In the car she sat for a moment before she told the driver where to go. “The house,” she said and the driver took her to her father's house The study smelled like him. She hadn’t expected it. Nearly a year, and no one had aired the room out or packed away what didn’t need to stay. The leather chairs still held the shape of him. The cologne was mostly gone, but not completely. She stood in the doorway longer than she meant to before she made herself walk in.She hadn’t come looking for anything. The rest of the house felt like it belonged to other people now. This room still felt like his.His photograph sat on the corner of the desk the way it always had him on the terrace in Cornwall, squinting into the sun, one hand half raised as if he’d been
The Vows we broke C5
Chapter 5 A Room Full of People Who Already DecidedThe boardroom smelled the way it always did, coffee and old carpet. That hadn't changed. Everyone sat in the seats they always sat in. Edmund at the head of the table, near her father's usual chair, close enough that Ivie noticed and hated that she noticed. Her aunt was two seats down. Faces she knew her whole life, arranged the way they'd always been arranged, except today none of them would quite look at her."Thank you all for coming on short notice," Edmund said, once she'd taken her seat. He kept his eyes on the table when he said it, though the words were plainly for her too. "I know it's an unusual time for this."Ivie set her folder down in front of her. She'd prepared for this the way she prepared for anything, notes, figures, a clear sense of what she'd say if she got the chance. She didn't know yet that the chance wasn't really coming."I'll get to it," Edmund said. "The past few
The Vows we broke C4
Chapter 4 The Story They Told FirstIvie saw it before she meant to. Her phone lit up on the desk while she was still staring at the redacted line in the calendar, and a name flashed across the screen a gossip account her cousin followed, the kind that posted three times a day and somehow always knew things first.She almost didn't open it. Then she saw Damien's name in the preview text and picked the phone up anyway.The post had gone up forty minutes ago.There was a photo from the party Damien and Sophia standing close together near the bar, taken from an angle that made it look like the middle of an ordinary conversation. Under it, a caption written like it was doing her a favor.*LIvie Sterling's engagement party took an unexpected turn last night when the bride-to-be reportedly accused her fiancé and her closest friend of an affair, based on a private business conversation she misunderstood. Sources close to the couple s
The Vows we broke C3
Chapter 3 The Morning After Doesn't Ask PermissionThe building looked exactly the same. That was the first thing Ivie noticed, and it annoyed her a little, that it did.She walked through the lobby the way she always did, heels loud on the marble, phone in one hand, scrolling through the morning's messages like they might tell her nothing had happened. Security nodded at her. The coffee cart sat in its usual spot. Somewhere above her, Sterling Holdings was doing exactly what it did every Tuesday.She held on to that. The sameness of it.She'd barely slept. Lying awake, she told herself coming in today mattered that if she stayed home, if she let one bad night keep her out of her own building, she'd be handing them something. She didn't know exactly who "them" was yet. She just knew she wasn't giving it to them.The elevator opened onto the fourteenth floor, and the first thing she registered was how fast two assis
The Vows we broke C2
Chapter 2 The sound a room makes Sophia didn't move. Neither did Ivie.For a moment nobody said anything. Party noise drifted down the hall and filled the space where words should have been.Then Damien turned and saw her too.Neither of them flinched. That was what she noticed first."Ivie." He set the glass down on the desk, careful, unhurried, like he had time for this. "How long have you been standing there?""Long enough." Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to."Okay." He said it the way you'd talk to someone who'd misread a text message. "Okay, before you…""Before I do what?" She stepped into the room. The door swung wider behind her. "Before I ask what you meant by playing house? Before I ask what the Sterling assets have to do with either of you?""You're taking this the wrong way.""Then tell me the right way." She waited. Actually waited, some part of her still hoping he'd say something that made this stu
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