Chapter 17
"She left," Victor said.
His voice had changed — thinner now, the warmth entirely exhausted.
"She chose to leave."
"Tell me she's lying," Harold said.
"Look at her and tell me she made all of it up."
Victor turned his head and looked at Anna.
A long moment.
"It wasn't personal," he said.
Anna's face didn't change.
"Yes it was."
"I had a plan.
You got in the way of it.
I made a decision."
"You destroyed twenty years of her life," Harold said.
"And your mother never knew her daughter was alive."
For the first time, something shifted in Victor's face that was not calculation.
It was brief.
A crack in a wall that had been built too thick for too long.
Then it closed again.
"You can't prove enough to matter," he said.
Patricia turned her laptop around so the screen faced him.
She didn't say anything.
She didn't need to.
Victor looked at the screen.
He looked at the secondary authorization trail.
He looked at his own credentials bracketing eleven years of transfers in an account built on his father's stolen name.
His hand came up and rested on the back of a chair.
He didn't pull it out.
He didn't sit down.
He just stood there with his hand on the chair.
"I want to speak with my attorney," he said.
"That's your right," Martin said.
"But before you make that call, you should know that Patricia has already been in contact with the financial crimes division.
They are expecting her documentation at nine o'clock." Martin checked his watch.
"That's in four minutes."
Victor's hand pressed down on the chair back.
"I built that company," he said.
It came out differently than anything else he'd said — rougher, stripped of the craft.
"Every year since you gave me the division.
I built it."
"You stole from it," Harold said.
"And you used my name to do it.
And you sent my daughter away to protect yourself from being caught." He paused.
"The company was never yours to build.
May you like
I'll be taking it back."
Victor looked at him for a long moment.
