POV Mia
The voices stop after four minutes.
I count them. I'm still sitting on the floor of the locked room with my father's last letter in my hands, and I count every second of those four minutes until the house goes quiet again. Then I sit for two more minutes just to be sure.
Then I start reading the letters again.
From the beginning. All of them. Every single word.
My father taught me numbers before he taught me anything else.
Not because he wanted me in his business, he spent my entire childhood making sure I stayed as far from it as possible. But because he said the world runs on patterns, and patterns live in numbers, and a person who can read numbers can read everything.
I was six years old when he first sat me down with a spreadsheet.
I was eight when I could spot an error in a financial report faster than his accountants.
