Rhett's pov
The file on Joel Pryce is forty-three pages long.
I've read it twice already. I'm reading it a third time because I do that, I read things until I stop finding new information in them, until the pattern is so clear I could recite it in my sleep. Two restraining order attempts that didn't stick. Six documented incidents of showing up at places she didn't invite him to. A man who has decided that persistence is a form of love and is wrong about that in a way that is becoming dangerous.
It's 5 a.m. The estate is quiet, my desk is lit. Everything is exactly as it should be.
The lens cap is in my top drawer.
I put it there last night instead of leaving it at the gate for her to collect, and I still don't know why . I open the Pryce file to page one and I do not think about the lens cap.
I also cannot account for why I texted her at 3:18 a.m.
Both of these facts exist. I am choosing not to do anything with them.
>>>
Declan arrives at seven with two coffees and the expression he wears when he has decided to be a problem.
He is my cousin and my COO and the only person alive who speaks to me like I'm a regular human being and expects to get away with it. Most days I tolerate this, some days it is useful. Today he drops into the chair across from my desk, puts his feet up, hands me a coffee, and says, "So, the trespasser."
"No."
"I heard she argued with you."
"Who told you that?"
"You have security cameras, Rhett. Also you texted someone at three in the morning, which you have literally never done in your life." He sips his coffee. "So, the trespasser."
I open the Pryce file again. Declan watches me open it. He glances at my desk drawer, the top one, the one that is slightly less closed than it was yesterday , and says nothing. But the corners of his mouth do something. I see it. I choose not to acknowledge it.
"Caden Adley's sister," he says. "Photography student, has been coming to the east fence for two weeks apparently, which means your security team has been asleep, which is a separate conversation." He pauses. "You really texted her about a branch."
"Caden asked me to keep an eye on her while he's abroad. That's the full extent of it."
"Right." He doesn't believe me. He has the decency not to say so. "The Pryce situation is active?"
"Escalating. I'm monitoring it."
Declan nods and lets it go, which is why I keep him around.
>>
The board meeting runs forty-five minutes on paper. I close it in eleven.
There's a rival circling one of my acquisitions, a man named Garrett who thinks patience looks like hesitation and has mistaken my silence over the past three weeks for uncertainty. I let him finish his positioning statement, which takes four minutes and contains two inaccuracies and one outright lie, and then I dismantle it point by point in the specific tone I use when I want someone to understand they have made a mistake without raising my voice.
By minute eleven, Garrett is looking at the table.
Declan is watching from the side of the room with the expression that is partly satisfaction and partly something else, something quieter and more complicated that I have filed away and not yet examined. He does that sometimes. Has a reaction he doesn't share. I've noticed it more in the last year.
Under the table my phone buzzes. I glance at it.
A message from my investigator, one line, "Pryce met with someone last night, not social, will confirm."
I read it. I put the phone face-down and finish the meeting.
My jaw is doing something, one millimeter. I feel it. I doubt anyone in this room notices.
Declan notices. He doesn't say anything.
>>>
Late afternoon I walk the estate grounds.
This is not unusual. I walk them every few days , it's a large property, there are things to check, it's practical, I am a practical person. I walk the south side, the garden, the old stone wall, the east fence.
I stop at the east fence.
I look at the oak.
The left branch is objectively better lit at this hour, the angle is cleaner, the light more even, more flattering to the shape of the canopy. She was right that it was obvious, she was also right that the branch she was shooting was harder, the right branch catches the light at a more difficult angle, the kind that rewards patience and a willingness to work for something most people would walk past.
I stand at the fence longer than necessary.
Then I walk back to the house, because I am aware of what I'm doing and that awareness should be sufficient to stop it.
>>>
My lead investigator calls at seven.
Eighteen months. That's how long I've been building this case, quietly, carefully, one piece at a time, like assembling something that will only make sense when it's finished. Eighteen months of financial records and witness statements and threads so thin I had to hold them up to the light to see them. And now we are close. He tells me we are close and I sit with it for one moment, something that is almost a relief, which I am not accustomed to feeling, and then I close it down, because relief is for after, and we are not after yet.
The second call comes forty minutes later.
My embedded informant. The man I put inside the network eight months ago. Found dead near the university district tonight, staged as an accident in a way that is almost convincing if you don't know what you're looking at.
I know what I'm looking at.
I open the photograph my investigator sends. I look at the dead man's face and something moves in the back of my memory, something old and specific, something from that night twenty years ago that I have never been able to fully surface. I have a fragment of it, a doorway, a sound. This man's face connects to that fragment in a way I can't yet explain.
I stare at the photograph for a long time.
Then I close the file, I pick up my phone. I look at the text thread — the one that shouldn't exist, the one I sent at 3:18 a.m. to a number I read off a luggage tag on a camera bag belonging to a girl who was trespassing on my property.
"You left your lens cap on my side of the fence, the left branch, you were right that it was harder."
I sent that, I don't send things at 3:18 a.m. I don't send things that have no operational purpose, I don't send things that are just true, with no reason attached.
I put the phone down.
I pick up my keys.
I pull up her address because it is protocol, I am going to drive past. I am not going to stop, this is a routine security check on someone Caden asked me to watch out for and nothing else.
I put the car in drive.
I stop.
I'm parked outside her building with the engine running and both hands on the wheel and I don't have an explanation for that, so I sit with it in the dark for a while.