Chapter 5: What His Father Left Behind
Garrett called at eight in the morning.
Logan was still at the table.
The coffee had gone cold.
The paper with Marcus's name on it had been folded and unfolded so many times the crease was starting to split.
"Your father wants to meet," Garrett said.
"Where?"
"The old office.
The one on Clement Street.
The one he kept after the company moved." A pause.
"He said you'd know it."
Logan knew it.
It was the first office his father had ever rented — a single room above a dry cleaner, back when the business was two people and a shared printer.
His father had kept the lease for thirty years.
Logan hadn't been there since he was a teenager.
He took the bus.
He didn't trust himself to drive.
The dry cleaner was still there.
The staircase still creaked on the third step.
The door at the top was unlocked.
His father was sitting at a small wooden desk by the window, both hands wrapped around a mug of tea, looking out at the street below.
He looked older than he had last night.
Or maybe Logan was just seeing him more clearly.
"Dad."
His father turned.
His eyes moved over Logan's face the way they used to when Logan was a boy and had come home from something difficult — reading the damage before asking about it.
"Sit down, son."
Logan sat in the chair across from him.
The room was almost empty.
A filing cabinet.
Two chairs.
The desk.
A framed photograph on the wall — Logan's mother, young, laughing at something off-camera.
"I owe you an explanation," his father said.
"You don't owe me anything."
"I do." He set down the mug.
"I found the first transfer record eight months ago.
I thought it was an error.
I went back through the records myself — quietly, at night, so no one in the office would notice.
The more I looked, the worse it became." He paused.
"By the time I understood the full picture, I had been looking for four months."
"Why didn't you come to me?"
His father looked at him steadily.
"Because your signature was on it."
The room was very quiet.
"And you thought—"
"I didn't know what to think.
That's the honest answer." His father's voice was careful and tired.
"You are my son.
I know who you are.
But I also know what I was looking at.
And I couldn't reconcile the two." He looked down at his hands.
"So I made the worst possible decision.
I decided to say nothing and leave."
"Dad—"
"I was a coward." The word came out clean and direct, no self-pity in it.
"I told myself I was protecting you.
But I was protecting myself from having to ask you a question I was afraid to hear the answer to."
Logan felt something loosen in his chest.
Not relief.
Something rawer than that.
"It was Marcus," Logan said.
His father looked up.
"I called him last night.
He knew I was coming.
By the time we hung up he'd already locked me out of the company systems." Logan leaned forward.
"He built everything, Dad.
Every account structure, every authorization protocol.
He knew exactly where to put my signature and exactly how to make it disappear into the routing."
His father was quiet for a long moment.
"I suspected him.
I wasn't certain."
"I'm certain."
"Suspicion and certainty are different things in a courtroom."
"I know." Logan looked at him.
"But Garrett said there are printouts.
Physical records.
If Marcus moved that money through shell accounts, there's a trail.
There's always a trail."
His father reached into the filing cabinet beside him.
He placed a manila envelope on the desk between them.
"I made copies," he said quietly.
"Before I packed the suitcase.
I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them.
But I made copies."
Logan looked at the envelope.
"How much?" he asked.
His father told him.
Logan sat back in his chair.
The number was large enough to end the company.
Large enough to end a great many things.
"There's something else," his father said.
He didn't reach for anything.
May you like
He just looked at Logan with an expression that was careful and sad and something else underneath that Logan couldn't name yet.
"Marcus wasn't working alone."
