Page 34 of My Girl to Take

The more I dig, the worse it gets.

Years. He’s been doing this for years.

My grip tightens on the mouse as I pull up another file, another thread of communication that I almost missed, buried deeper than the rest. Encrypted just enough to avoid casual discovery, but not enough to escape me.

And that’s when I see her name.

Ivy.

Something cold settles in my chest. I open it.

I shouldn’t be surprised. But I am.

The emails are clear. Too clear. No pretense. No caution beyond hiding the account itself. Conversations that blur the line between business and something personal.

They’re involved. Not just in this. In each other.

An affair. Of course.

It fits too easily, the pieces sliding together in a way that makes everything make sense. Her sudden reappearance, her interest in getting back into the house, into my father’s life. Not out of guilt, not out of regret, but because there is something to gain.

Inheritance. Control. And Philip gets to keep bleeding the company dry while no one is looking.

Then I find the calendar.

It’s nothing. It’s a routing artifact, a meeting invite that went through the wrong server eighteen months ago and got archived where it shouldn’t have been. Philip to Ivy, two lines, no subject.

And copied into the body, pasted in from somewhere else, is an internal email chain about a set of advisory fees that somebody in operations had started asking questions about.

Kiera’s query. The one she raised a year ago and was told to drop.

Philip sent it to Ivy the same week.

I read it four times.

Because there are two ways to read it, and I know that even while I’m doing it. Either Philip flagged her question to his accomplice as a threat—the girl is looking, handle it. Or the girl was never looking at all, and the two of them were comparing notes on a piece of theater she’d put on for the file.

One of those is what happened. The other one is what I’m about to decide happened.

I sit there for a long time with my hand over my mouth.

Then another thought hits.

Kiera.

My fingers still on the keyboard as I lean back slightly. My mind moves fast, connecting things I don’t want to connect, questions forming before I can stop them.

She didn’t tell me that Ivy had come back.

I know she came back. I’ve known for four days because my father told me on Sunday in about nine words, then changed the subject like he’d said something indelicate. Ivy walked into that house on Wednesday night.

The night Kiera came to my door with her bag and her face against my chest and told me she’d missed me.

I asked her. Once. I stood there with my hand on her back, said her name, and gave her the whole thing, wide open. She said not tonight. I let it go because I thought that’s what you do.

Four days.

I’ve been waiting four days.