He buried the wrong man

Chapter 3: A woman that does not trust easily

Wren Halloway chose the venue herself – a small coffee shop in Dunmore Row where the chairs were not all the same size and the barista was definitely familiar with her. When Thane arrived, she was already sitting, a lawyer beside her with a legal pad in his hands, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else.

Wren said, not exactly a compliment, "You're punctual. It's a rarity in this business.”

“I don't like to waste people's time.” Thane sat across from her, with nothing in his hands, no folder, no pitch deck. “In particular, those who have had a rough month.”

"A rough month." She laughed, short and without humor. “Well, that's one way to say it.”

Her lawyer cleared his throat. “Before we proceed further, Mr Ashworth, I'd like to get a feel for what structure you're proposing. A minority stake? Full acquisition? Something in between?"

“Controlling interest, which is a private entity not affiliated with Halcyon,” Thane said. “I keep the entity free of conflicts with my day job, and Ms. Halloway keeps operational control.”

Wren studied him, arms folded, clearly not impressed with the neatness of his response. "Why would a Halcyon executive want to keep something like that separate from Halcyon? Extra work for no reason”

“If Halcyon comes into contact with your agency, some people begin to wonder why a struggling little boutique suddenly has significance for a studio that's ignored it for years.” Thane's voice remained calm as he watched her closely. "I don't want to bring that up right now.”

“Some people,” Wren repeated. "You mean Desmond Kane."

The name hit him harder than he was expecting and he schooled his face before it could give anything away. “Why do you think that?”

“Desmond Kane's name keeps coming up more than once in the demise of this agency, Mr. Ashworth, and I've been working on trying to figure out why for the past year.” Her voice grew harsh, a little more guarded, more like anger. “In eight months, three of my biggest distribution deals have all fallen apart for reasons that never really made sense. Sudden scheduling conflicts. 'Creative direction' always being a concern by someone from Halcyon, just before the deal falls through.”

Thane sat very still, sensing something he hadn't expected to surface in this conversation. In the version of events that he recalled, Wren's agency had simply been swallowed by an industry that consumed small agencies like a bird eats a mouse, one more name quietly absorbed into Halcyon's portfolio for a few pennies. 

“Do you believe that someone intentionally sabotaged you?”

“I don't think so. I know it. I just can't imagine that a studio as big as Halcyon would care about an agency this small.” She leaned forward, a fierce and controlled look in her eyes. “Before I sign anything with you, I want to know exactly what you do know, Mr. Ashworth, because I don't want to be lied to by men in pretty suits.”

Her lawyer shifted, clearly uncomfortable with how far off script this had gone, but he didn't interrupt.

Thane thought carefully about what he was going to say next. He couldn't tell her the truth, not the whole truth, not yet, not the part where he had lived four years beyond this very conversation and knew things about Halcyon's finances that shouldn't be in his head at all. He could provide her with just enough to gain her trust, but not so much as to make her run.

“I don't have proof yet either,” he replied. “But I have a feeling that's what you just told me. I think there's some fraud in Halcyon's books that goes back longer than anyone knows, and I think your agency may have been in the blast radius of someone protecting it.”

Wren went very quiet. “Someone like Desmond Kane.”

"Possibly. Possibly someone above him." Thane fixed her with a stare. “I'm not there yet with all the pieces, but I'm going to be there.”

"And you want my agency as what — a foothold? Leverage?"

“I want your agency to live because it deserves to live, and I don't think anyone who tried to destroy you wanted anyone to really look that closely.” Thane leaned forward, matching her intensity. “You've been thinking for a year that you were losing because of bad luck. I don't think you were losing because of bad luck, I think someone made a decision that your agency was expendable and I want to prove them wrong.”

The hush was so long that the lawyer even ceased fidgeting with his pen.

Finally, though with a bit of the edge taken from her voice, Wren said, "That's a very convenient story. At the very moment I'm on the verge of losing everything, a Halcyon executive appears out of nowhere to save the little agency that no one cares about.”

"Oh, I know what you're saying.”

"Do you?" She looked at him for a long time, there was something calculating behind her eyes. “Fine. If you say so. If there's something rotten in Halcyon's books, and my agency got caught up in it by accident, I believe you. What do you do when you discover what you're searching for? Do I get an explanation or do I get used and discarded just like I have been used and discarded?”

“You get the truth," said Thane. “At whatever price to you, I will get it.”

Wren looked at her lawyer, an unspoken exchange between them, and then turned back towards Thane, arms still crossed, but not as rigid as they had been.

“Quarterly financial transparency, full operational control, and if you ever try to fold my agency into Halcyon's portfolio without my explicit consent, this deal is void and I go public with everything I know about your little pattern of convenient disasters.”

Thane said without hesitation, “Agreed.”

"You didn't even negotiate."

“I don't need to, all of what you wanted is what I was going to give you anyway.”

Wren's expression changed, but only slightly, from suspicion to curiosity. "You're either the most honest executive I've ever met, or the most dangerous one."

"Maybe both," Thane said.

She was about to smile — the first real break in her guarded composure since he'd sat down. “My lawyer will be sending the paperwork tomorrow, don't make me regret it Mr. Ashworth.”

"I won't."

He did not say it lightly, it was a serious statement. Behind her crumbling agency, entangled in scheduling problems and dead distribution contracts that never seemed to add up, lay a thread Thane hadn't anticipated finding this early: evidence that Desmond's fraud may not be as limited, or as recent, as he had thought.

He'd come looking for one weapon against Desmond Kane.

He began to think that he had just stumbled upon the beginning of something bigger than they knew.

---

He didn't go straight back to Halcyon. He sat outside the coffee shop in his car for a long time, playing the scene over in his head, mulling over Wren's words until they took on a more solid form than suspicion.

‘In eight months 3 of my biggest distribution deals have fallen apart.’

He couldn't remember Wren's name ever being used inside the walls of Halcyon in the four years he had lived there, never once in a budget meeting, never once in a passing hallway conversation, never once anywhere near Desmond's orbit. If Desmond himself had been behind the calls that killed her deals, it would have shown up somewhere in the trail — the one Thane had spent six months of testimony learning to read. It hadn't.

Which implied that his memory was faulty, or that someone else was making the calls, and using Halcyon's name, or Desmond's.

He retrieved his cell phone and read the list of names and dates and shell entities he had compiled the night before, from bits of testimony whose meaning he hadn't quite grasped the first time he heard them.

‘W. Halloway — sabotage older than known fraud timeline. Not part of the Ellery Group scheme? Or older than it?’

It remained unanswered, blinking.

His phone buzzed. Desmond's text, when it came, was casual and unconcerned — the message of a man who had no idea anything had changed in his well-constructed world.

‘All sorted out with Ellery?’

Thane looked at the message for a long time before typing back.

‘Almost. Should be wrapped by tomorrow.’

It wasn't quite a lie. He hadn't finished yet, not with Ellery, and not with the far bigger question that Wren Halloway had just given him, without either of them being aware of it.

He started the car and pulled back onto the road, already beginning to reshape everything he thought he knew about the four years that had brought him to that holding cell. "He had expected to know the whole shape of his own failure when he went into this second chance.

Thane wasn't certain anymore that was true, for the first time since he woke up in his own office with the ink barely dry on the page beneath his pen.