The Wire Transfer

He didn't sleep that night.

The transfer was real — confirmed by morning, sitting in his father's old study with the family accountant on speakerphone at six a.m., asking questions in a voice he barely recognized as his own. A hundred and eighty thousand dollars, wired to an account under Nadia's maiden name eleven days after she vanished. Not hush money for an affair, the accountant said carefully. It read more like severance.

Like a business transaction.

He drove to Nadia's apartment before he'd decided what he was going to say.

"There was a wire transfer," he told her, standing in her kitchen with Bennett's folder still under his arm. "A hundred and eighty thousand dollars, eleven days after you left. My mother's signature. Did you know about this?"

Nadia's face went carefully blank — the same blankness from the park bench, the same from the night Margaret apologized. "No account was ever opened in my name that I touched, Julian. I left with three hundred dollars and a bag of maternity clothes."

"Then where did it go?"

Neither of them had an answer yet. What they had instead was Bennett Cole, holding proof of a payment neither of them made, dangling a merger vote over Julian's head like it was the only leverage in the room — and getting that wrong, Julian slowly realized, meant Bennett didn't actually know where the money went either.

He'd just assumed Julian would rather protect the story than question it.

Nadia's phone rang before he could say any of that out loud. She glanced at the screen, and whatever color was left in her face disappeared.

"It's a reporter," she said. "From the Herald's business desk. She wants a comment about my daughter's father."