He buried the wrong man

Chapter 8: A name I haven't earned yet

The invitation came three days later, not via the usual channels within Halcyon, but via a personal assistant who called Thane's cell phone directly, which told him just as much as the invitation.

The assistant said “Ms. Fairweather would like to meet you for lunch privately on Thursday. She said not to tell anyone at Halcyon in advance.”

"Any particular reason?"

“She said that you would understand when you got there.”

He didn't fully know why, but he accepted it, and was curious enough about what a member of Halcyon's controlling family wanted from him in private to put aside the unease the secrecy provoked.

---

The restaurant she had selected was in a quiet corner of the city, a place that didn't have to advertise itself. He arrived to find Rosalind already seated, a glass of wine untouched in front of her, her expression measured and curious, as he recalled from the night of the gala.

She said “Thank you for coming on short notice,” motioning him to sit. “I believe the secrecy is strange to you.”

"A little."

“My brother has a tendency to see things I don't want him to see, particularly in Halcyon's leadership.” Rosalind's voice remained light but a calculating glint lurked behind her calm demeanor. “Most of our communication with the studio is done by Julian, I like to see from afar and make my own decisions.”

“So what have you learned about me?”

“You're either very good or very good at looking very good.” She studied him over the rim of her glass. “The gala. You didn't wait for someone higher up to give you the go ahead to take action. Most executives in your position would have called for guidance. You just took action.”

"Someone needed to."

“You said that night as well.” A small smile played on her lips. “I'm thinking, Mr. Ashworth, that maybe that instinct is carried over into other aspects of your job, too. Financial oversight, for example.”

Thane kept his face carefully blank, aware that whatever Rosalind was working through was not something to be trifled with. "Financial responsibility is taken seriously.”

"Do you? I have been looking at Halcyon's quarterly reports for the past few years, and I have seen trends that I don't like. "Vendor spend doesn't correlate with production output. Margins that don't add up, not by our own internal explanations.” She placed her glass down and looked him in the eye. “Mr Ashworth, I don't think those patterns are coincidental and I don't think Desmond Kane is totally oblivious of them, whatever he tells the board.”

It was direct, he was surprised, but he was able to bounce back and think about the amount of information to share with a woman he had known for only a week. “It's a serious charge.”

“It's an observation, not yet an accusation, I don't know yet.” Rosalind leaned forward a little. "But I think you already suspect something like that. I think that's why you've been doing what you've done this past week — buying an ailing talent agency through a private company, postponing a standard vendor contract without a clear reason, digging through old financials under the pretense of an efficiency audit.”

Thane's stomach tightened. “You've been watching me, haven't you?”

“I'm on the lookout for everyone. I believe it is only because of this that my family still runs this studio after three generations.” Her voice was friendly, even warm, but there was no denying the gravity of her words. "I'm not here to threaten you, Mr. Ashworth. I'm here because I feel like we're seeing the same problem from different perspectives and I'd rather work together than in parallel.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Carefully exchanged information between two people who have reason to distrust Desmond Kane's version of events.” Rosalind's eyes never left him. “I can get financial records at the board level that you can't, you can get day-to-day operations that I can't, if there's any real fraud in this studio, neither of us is going to find it quickly enough on my own.”

Thane paused, doing the math he had done with Corwin days before, but the stakes here seemed much greater. Rosalind Fairweather was a manifestation of real power, the power that could save him or kill him, depending on her allegiance when the truth emerged.

“Why should I trust you with this?” he asked at last. “You don't know me very well at all.”

“Trust is not really about knowing someone well in this industry, it's about aligned incentive.” Rosalind's smile grew more acute and sincere. “Whether you're ready to tell me just why or not, you have every reason to want the truth about Halcyon's finances out, Mr. Ashworth.”

"And if I decline?"

“Then I watch from afar and you keep going without the help and support my family could give you.” She shrugged lightly. “I would like the other one better, I think you would too.”

Thane looked at her for a long time, considering all the possibilities. There was real risk in Rosalind's offer, because by taking it this soon, he was putting himself in the same circle as the Fairweather family, and putting himself in the same position as the Fairweather family were in the previous week — in the middle of the institutional fire. It also gave him something he couldn't easily get alone: legitimate authority, board-level access, protection that Barrett's tacit cooperation and Wren's guarded partnership couldn't provide on their own.

Finally, he said "I'll have to think about what I'm willing to share.”

"That's a reasonable position." Rosalind stretched her hand across the table. "Take the time you need, Mr. Ashworth. Just don't take too long.”

He shook her hand, and felt the weight of an alliance that he had not expected to form when he woke up in his office four years ago.

As he was about to go, Rosalind said, "One more thing. If my investigation ever comes across any of the direct financial dealings with external parties that my brother Julian deals with, I would appreciate it if you raised any concerns with me first, before any other board member.”

Thane stopped short at a word in her voice. “Why do you need that in particular?”

“It's family loyalty,” Rosalind replied, but a wary look crossed her face. “Julian is not always as careful as I am in trusting people, I'd like to deal with any complications quietly, in the family, before it becomes anyone else's problem.”

Thane nodded, putting the request in the file of everything he was gathering, but there was something in the specificity of her request that didn't sit right with him as he headed back to his car.

---

He didn't drive straight back to the studio. Instead, he sat in his car outside the restaurant, replaying the conversation over and over, until he was certain it had never really been about family loyalty at all.

‘If at any time your investigation comes into contact with those arrangements, come to me with any concerns.’

The woman had made an oddly specific request, after spending most of their conversation projecting easy control over all the variables in the room. Those who felt totally secure usually did not have to think about how to communicate bad news to them. The request implied that Rosalind suspected, if she didn't know, that her brother's financial arrangements were riskier than she had been prepared to admit.

Thane retrieved his phone and added another item to the growing list that was more of a map of all things he didn't yet know.

‘Rosalind, outside financial arrangements, Julian Fairweather: first contact if investigation intersects. Why?’

For a long time he looked at the question, then started the car, the form of Halcyon's fraud growing in ways he hadn't thought of when he'd withheld his signature on the Ellery renewal. Desmond Kane. Ashgrove Creative Logistics. Wren's failed distribution efforts. Now, it seems, something with Julian Fairweather that his own sister had to deal with but not with directly.

None of it was what Thane could recall from his former life. He had walked into his second chance thinking he knew the whole blueprint of his own undoing, one man, one scheme, one betrayal, which he had to expose before it could bring him down again. Every day since the morning he'd sat in that chair had made that certainty more complicated.

He was heading back to Halcyon with the sun setting in the west, and he knew that whatever he was going to create now was much bigger, much more dangerous, than the revenge he'd envisioned.