A pause.
“The kind that made me ask to meet in person.”
It wasn’t relief in his voice.
It was fear.
Part 6
We met at a diner in Norwalk because apparently every important turn in my life now happened under fluorescent lights next to a coffee machine that had seen better decades.
Tobias was younger than I remembered from office events. Early thirties, neat haircut, tired eyes. He kept checking the front windows like he expected Nathan to come through them.
“Thank you for meeting me,” he said.
He slid a manila folder across the table.
Inside were transfer records. Entity registration documents. Wire confirmations. A spreadsheet printout with initials and dates in Tobias’s tidy assistant handwriting.
I knew what I was looking at within five seconds.
Nathan had started moving money.
Major money.
Not the petty, impulsive kind men stash when they think they’re being clever. This was structured. Layered. Routed through a new LLC registered under Margaret Callaway—Henry’s wife. The paper distance was meant to look clean. The timing was not. Three transfers, just under the threshold that would have made certain internal controls louder, all within the same three-week window after I filed.
My pulse settled in a way that would sound strange to anyone who didn’t understand me. Fear sharpened me. Numbers steadied me.
“He told you to process these?” I asked.
Tobias nodded. “He told me not to put them through the regular system. Said it was temporary restructuring.”
“It’s concealment.”
“I figured.”
I kept flipping.
Then I saw a billing code for outside legal work routed through the firm’s internal expense ledger and my eyes narrowed.
“He used firm resources.”
“Some of them,” Tobias said. “There’s more.”
The waitress came by with coffee I hadn’t ordered. Tobias didn’t touch his.
“What else?”
He looked down at the table, then at me. “Brooke Kensington is pregnant.”
The words sat there for a second, stupid and flat.
Pregnant.
I heard the clink of silverware from the kitchen pass-through. The hiss of bacon on a grill. A Christmas song playing too softly over the speakers. Everything normal. Everything wrong.
“How do you know?”
“I overheard him talking to Gerald. Eight weeks, maybe nine. He said they’d present it as evidence of a stable future home if custody got ugly.”
I stared at him.
Stable future home.