Lahat ng Kabanata ng IF YOU LOVE ME, DIE FOR ME: Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 40

Madeline's POVThe woman who walked into Crawford's office on a Tuesday morning looked the way I must have looked the week before my trial, which is to say she looked like someone who had not slept properly in months and had learned to perform composure so well that only another person who had done the same thing would notice the performance.Her name was Iris Tan. Twenty-eight years old. Former financial analyst at a mid-sized investment firm called Meridian Capital, terminated eight months ago following an internal audit that found irregularities in a series of client accounts she had managed.She had been charged three weeks ago.Sol had taken the intake call, and he had brought it to me because he said, something about the case did not sit right with him. I had told him that something not sitting right with him was exactly the kind of instinct Crawford existed to act on.She sat across my desk and told me her story in the flat, careful way of someone who had told it enough times t

Madeline's POVHenry Lau was not at his apartment.His housekeeper told us he had gone to his club, a private members' establishment in the north of the city that I had never had reason to enter before and that regarded my arrival with the particular coolness of a place designed to make certain people feel they did not belong.We found him in a reading room at the back, alone with a newspaper and a pot of tea, and he looked up when we walked in with the expression of a man who had been expecting visitors but had hoped for a little more time before they arrived."Sit down," he said, before either of us had spoken.We sat."You found Meridian Capital," he said."Our analyst found it," I said. "Connected to a current case. A woman being prosecuted for financial irregularities in an account she didn't touch, using the same infrastructure as the original consortium."Henry Lau set his newspaper down with the careful deliberateness of someone buying themselves three seconds."Tell me who re

Madeline's POVJeremy arrived with the coffee already made because I had not waited.He came in and sat across from me at the kitchen table of the apartment that was supposed to be temporary and had become something more permanent without my quite deciding it, and he told me everything Donovan had said and everything his regulatory contact had said, and I listened without interrupting, which I was better at than I used to be.When he finished, I was quiet for a moment."She built something that outlasted her," I said. "Graham took it over and ran it for fifteen years, and when he fell, she just stepped back in and ran it herself.""She has been running it herself the whole time," Jeremy said. "Graham was the face. She was the structure.""She killed my father.""We believe so," he said. "The evidence is building. It is not yet proven.""She killed my father," I said again, not arguing with him, just saying it, the way you say something that needs to be said out loud before you can do

Madeline's POVIris Tan's lawyer had told her the case was strong, but the timeline was uncertain, which was lawyer language for we might win but it will take longer than you can afford.She could not afford long. She had been without a salary for eight months. She had been living on savings that were running out at a pace that made her calculate, every morning, how many more months before the calculation changed from uncomfortable to impossible.She came back to the office on a Wednesday to go over the defense framework Sol had built, and I sat in on the meeting, not to take over but to listen, because listening to how someone described their own destruction sometimes told you things the documents could not.She was sharper than in the first meeting. Less performing composure, more actual composure, which was the difference between someone who had not slept in months and someone who had slept twice since finding help."The timestamp evidence," Sol was saying, "combined with your Hong

Madeline's POVThe light on Lake Como in late October was the kind of light that had no agenda.It came off the water in the morning in long flat sheets, and by afternoon it had moved into something warmer and more oblique, and in the evening it did something to the mountains across the water that I suspected my father had tried to describe to my mother once and had found the words insufficient, which was why he had kept the photograph on his desk instead.I understood the photograph now.We arrived on a Thursday, stayed in a house that Jeremy had rented rather than a hotel because he understood, without being told, that a hotel would feel like a visit and this needed to feel like something else, and for the first three days I did almost nothing except sit by the water at various times of day and let the light do whatever it was doing.Jeremy did not try to fill the silence, which was the thing about him in these two weeks that I had not expected and would not forget. He read. He cook