The price of her forgiveness

EVERY SECOND THURSDAY

Chapter 10: Every Second Thursday

Lachlan's 

I found Dev in the stairwell on the thirty-eighth floor, eating a cold meat pie out of a paper bag.

"Don't tell my wife," he said around a mouthful. "She thinks I'm on the salad."

"Dev. I need to ask you something, and I need you not to be offended."

He stopped chewing. The stairwell was concrete and fluorescent light and floor polish, the one place in the building the cameras didn't reach. I'd found out Dev hid up here in my first month as CEO and never said a word, and I'd never once asked him why.

"Go on."

"Did you tell anyone about the twelve per cent?"

"No."

"Not even in passing?"

"Lachlan." He set the pie down on the step like a man laying down a weapon. "You said tell nobody. I haven't told my wife or my mother. I wouldn't tell my own reflection."

"Gideon Marsh said it to me at lunch. The exact figure."

Dev didn't flinch. He went still, eyes on a point over my shoulder while his mind worked.

"That's not possible. The figure's on one machine. My laptop. It isn't on the shared drive; I was careful." He rubbed his forehead with a greasy thumb. "Unless... Sunday morning. IT sent me an alert. Someone requested access to the settlement folder with a board-level override. 8:40. I thought it was an audit."

"Who requested it?"

"The ticket said Office of the Board Secretary. That's Lorna. Marsh's PA."

Below us, a door slammed, and the sound ran up the stairwell and died.

"It wasn't names," Dev said. "Only trade dates and amounts. But anyone with a calculator and half an hour could add them up." He swallowed. "I should have flagged it."

"You did what I asked." I put a hand on his shoulder and felt how thin it was under the suit. We'd both lost weight this year. "Don't mention it to Marsh. I'm going to look at his calendar."

"You can do that?"

"I'm the CEO. I can do anything I'm bored enough to do." I managed half a smile. "It's the only perk."

The system had been built by a vendor in Bangalore years ago and never loved. I sat at my desk on the fortieth floor with the blinds half down and the door shut, and typed my credentials into a window that took nineteen seconds to load. Every executive and board member, their calendars one click away. I'd never used it. It had always felt like reading someone's mail. Tonight I decided that was a luxury I'd run out of.

I opened Marsh.

It was a ruthlessly tidy calendar. Blue for board meetings, green for external, yellow for personal. I scrolled through lunches and committees, a procession of names I knew, not sure what I was looking for.

Last Saturday was marked yellow. 10:30 to 12:30. Personal.

I stared at it.

The window in which a card marked Housekeeping had opened my front door at 11:14, and forty minutes of footage had gone missing.

It could be anything, I told myself. A haircut. A wife. Marsh had a house in Vaucluse and a sailing boat. Personal meant personal. I was a man with no sleep building a gallows out of a colour.

I scrolled on, and it was there in the dullest part of the screen. Every second Thursday, a small yellow block at half past twelve.

C.V. Hunters Hill.

I scrolled back a fortnight. There again. A fortnight further. There again. It ran through the whole year like a seam. I dragged the date range backward, the system groaned, and gave me everything.

Every second Thursday. Twelve-thirty. Hunters Hill. For three years.

Outside, the harbour was a flat grey plate under a sky that couldn't make up its mind.

There was a house in Hunters Hill with a chipped blue tile above the sink, a crooked clock, and a photograph by the window of a man on a station verandah with a cattle dog.

I tried to think about it like a stranger.

Marsh and my uncle were friends. Everyone knew that. Cormac had put Marsh's name forward for the board eleven years ago, when Vance Enterprise was a rented office and three employees. A safe pair of hands, he'd said, and I'd thanked him. Of course they met. Two men in their fifties with a shared interest in my future, having lunch. If it were anyone else's uncle I wouldn't have looked twice. That bothered me most.

But Cormac had stood at his own sink on Sunday, drying his hands, and said, Gideon rang me yesterday. Rang. As if it were rare. As if it were a favour.

I scrolled to the start of the series.

The first block was dated the second Thursday of September, three years ago. I knew that month in my teeth. It was the month after she left.

I did the arithmetic twice. The lunches began four weeks after the IPO. Four weeks after a forged report was put in my hands. Four weeks after I stood in my kitchen with my arms folded and sent a woman out into the dark.

It doesn't mean anything. The voice that said it was calm and reasonable and sounded a lot like Cormac's. They were worried about you. You'd stopped eating. Gideon was on the board, and Cormac wanted to help.

It was a good explanation. It fitted perfectly. It was exactly what I'd have said in someone else's defence.

I closed the window. My desktop came back: the old Bondi flat, a square of blue sky, a washing line, a yellow towel. My uncle had carried me through the worst year of my life. He cooked me terrible dinners and drove me to school and sat up with me the night I turned fifteen and cried for my father. If I couldn't trust him, I couldn't trust anything that had ever been kind to me.

I would sooner doubt gravity.

But I'd learned something in two weeks, and it sat in me like a splinter. I had once trusted exactly the wrong people because they were the ones in front of me. I'd looked at what was shown and never asked what was hidden. And a woman had paid for that.

At seven, my phone rang. Uncle C.

I let it ring three times. Then I made my voice into the one he knew.

"Working late, mate?" Warm, easy, a little worried. A kettle hissed behind him, and an old song played low on the radio.

"A bit."

"Have you eaten?"

"I had lunch."

"At Harold's. I heard. How was it?"

My hand stopped on the mouse. "Who told you I was at Harold's?"

"Gideon mentioned it. Rang this afternoon." A pause, so casual you'd miss it. "Did he lean on you? All that steel, thinks everyone's a container."

"He wants the wedding brought forward."

"Does he now? And what did you say?"

"That I'd think about it."

"Good lad. Never agree in the room. Always leave a door." He laughed quietly. "Come Sunday. I'll do a chicken. A proper one, not like the lamb."

"Sunday."

"You sound tired, my boy."

My boy. I'd heard it a hundred times. It had never once sounded like anything but love.

"I'm fine."

"You always say that. Eat something. Sleep. The world will still be there in the morning. Goodnight, mate."

I put the phone face-up on the desk and stared at it until the screen went dark.

Gideon rang. The same words. The same lightness.

At nine I was still there. The cleaners had come and gone. The only light was the monitor and the strip of harbour at the edge of the blinds.

I opened the calendar once more. I'd told myself I wouldn't.

I went to the most recent block, the second Thursday of this month, three days before the launch. C.V. Hunters Hill. 12:30. I clicked it, expecting nothing.

There was a note.

One line, typed fast, no capitals, the way you type something you don't want to read twice.

S.H. confirmed. He doesn't know yet.

Two letters. They could mean anything. A person, a company, a suburb.

But I'd carried a name in my head for three days. A name Dev had given me in the back of a car on the way to Watsons Bay. A shell company in Jersey run by a dead man.

Sterling Harbour Holdings.

I couldn't know it was the same. There were a thousand S's and a thousand H's in the world.

But the note was dated a week and a half before I'd ever heard that name. And whoever wrote it had known it already.

He doesn't know yet.

I read the four words again, small and grey and flat. I couldn't tell whether the he was me.

I only knew I'd never in my life been so afraid of a pronoun.