The price of her forgiveness

THE VOICEMAIL

Chapter 7: The Voicemail

Kaelia's 

"Is work a bad man?" Wren asked, her mouth full of toast.

I stopped with the knife halfway through the butter. "Who told you that?"

"Uncle Jett. He said you're going to work to be cross with a bad man."

Behind me, Jett became very interested in the coffee machine. "Uncle Jett talks a lot for someone who sleeps on our couch."

"Is it true?"

"Work is spreadsheets and boring phone calls. Nobody's bad."

She chewed on that. She had Vegemite on one cheek and a look I knew, the one that said she'd caught me leaving something out. She'd had it since she was a baby, as if she'd been born knowing that adults edit.

"If he's bad," she said, "tell Uncle Jett to be cross too."

"I promise."

I kissed the top of her head and kept my mouth there a second too long, like I was memorising her. Honey and sleep. I'd stopped sleeping through a night the day she was born, and I had never once wanted that back.

In the car, Jett waited until we'd cleared Palm Beach. "I only said you had a meeting. She fills in the rest herself."

"She gets that from me."

I'd done it at her age, in a cold house in Queensland, listening at doors. Nobody told me my mother was dying. I worked it out from the way the housekeeper stopped talking when I walked in. I'd sworn I would never do that to a child of mine, and here I was, three years into the biggest omission of her life, calling it protection.

The office was on Level 9 of an ordinary building in Martin Place, between a tax accountant and a company that sold industrial valves. A brass plate by the lift said Sterling Harbour Holdings. Nobody had ever asked what we did. That was why I'd picked it. I'd wanted a room where I could be nobody, sit at a plain desk, and quietly take apart a man's life without a single person looking up.

Jett went to find coffee. I stayed in the basement carpark with the engine off and took out my phone.

I'd told myself on the drive I wouldn't. My voicemail held one saved message, pushed to the bottom of the list so I wouldn't see it every time I checked. My thumb knew where it lived.

"Hey, Kael. It's me." Traffic behind his voice, a horn, a cheer from somewhere far off. "Ten past three. The roadshow's done. One of them laughed at the joke about the lifts, the one you told me to cut. You were right about the opening, by the way. I did it your way and it worked." A pause, shy and breathless. "I'll be late tonight. Dinner, handshakes. I'll bring noodles, because we're classy." His voice dropped, the way it did when nobody else could hear. "I couldn't have done any of this without you. I don't say it enough. I'm going to say it more, starting tonight. I love you, Kael. Don't wait up."

Eleven seconds of silence, and then it ended.

The twenty-first of August, ten past three in the afternoon. Six hours later he put a lie on our kitchen table and told me to get out.

I pressed my wrist against my mouth until the noise stopped.

He said he'd say it more.

The window rapped twice. I hit my elbow on the door. Jett stood outside with two paper cups. I dropped the phone face-down on my knee and lowered the glass.

"Ten minutes," he said.

"I was reading emails."

"You've got your thumb in a death grip."

I looked down. I was rubbing the bare skin where a ring used to sit, hard enough to leave a mark. I stopped.

He handed me a coffee and crouched beside the car so we were level. He smelled like salt and cheap soap. He'd smelled like that in the creek bed when we were seven, and he'd pulled me out of it by the back of my shirt, and he had never once let me forget it.

"The voicemail," he said.

"Don't."

"I'm not going to say anything. I just want you to know I know." He turned his cup in his hands. "He sounded happy."

"He was."

"Did he mean it?"

I'd asked myself that so many times it had worn smooth, like a step in an old house. "Yes. That's the worst part."

"Then why..."

"Because somebody got to him in six hours." My voice cracked and I flattened it. "Somebody put a piece of paper in his hands and some photographs on a table, and he decided in one afternoon that he'd never known me. I can't forgive that. Not that he believed them. That it was so easy."

Jett said nothing. For once he didn't try to be funny.

"I'm not going back for him," I said. "The man on that message is gone. I'm going back for what the other one took. My daughter's father. Her first three years. Everything I'd have given him if he'd listened for one minute."

"Right."

"And he's going to pay for it."

"Right," he said again, softer, and stood. His knees cracked. "Then let's go upstairs and be properly terrifying."

I put the phone in my bag and wiped under both eyes with the heel of my hand, quick, like clearing a window. Then I put on the face I'd been practising for three years, the cold capable one. It fit. I'd built it to.

The lift opened onto a grey corridor that smelled of toner. Jett went ahead to find the lights. I was digging for my key when I noticed I didn't need it.

The door was off the latch. Not open, only a few millimetres, enough for the draught to move the dust on the mat.

"Jett."

He was beside me in a second. He saw my face, then the door, and the easy look left him. He held up a flat palm and I stepped back. He pushed the door with two fingers.

Nothing inside had moved. Same cheap desk, same lamp, same pot plant I'd bought to make the place look lived in. Jett crouched at the lock and ran a thumb along the brass.

"Not forced. Whoever it was had a key."

"The building manager has a master."

"So does the cleaner. So does anyone who's ever stolen one." He stood. "That's not a comfort."

On the carpet inside the door lay a white envelope.

It hadn't been there on Tuesday. I'd walked over that square of floor and I'd have noticed. I picked it up by the corner. No stamp. One line on the front, printed in black.

Ms Kingsford.

My mouth went dry.

Nobody called me that. Not on any lease, any contract, any company I'd built in three years. Kingsford was my mother's name and mine, buried under four layers of paper so deep that Lachlan hadn't known it in five years of sharing a bed. I'd been Kaelia Ward, and then Sterling. Kingsford was the thing I kept in my pocket like a stone.

Thea's message had been right. Somebody had gone through Sterling Harbour, and now they'd come out the other side holding the name underneath.

"Don't open it," Jett said.

"I'd rather read it than imagine it."

I slid a fingernail under the flap. One sheet, folded once. My hands were steady, and under them my pulse was hammering like a fist on a door.

Stop digging, Ms Kingsford. You won't like what you own.

I read it twice. The words didn't change. Down the corridor a lift opened and closed, and we both turned our heads like animals at a waterhole. Neither of us moved until the floor was quiet again.

"Who still knows that name?" Jett asked, low.

"You. Thea. My father's old solicitor, who is eighty and lives in a nursing home in Toowoomba. A few people in a filing cabinet in Brisbane."

"That's a short list."

"Which is what frightens me. It takes very few people to know a secret. It only takes one to sell it."

Jett took the paper from my hand and read it. I watched the colour leave his face and come back hot. "That's it. We're pulling Wren out tonight. I'll drive her to the station myself."

"No."

"Kaelia."

"No." I said it quietly, the way my father used to, and it stopped him. I took the paper back and looked at the last line.

What you own.

Not what I was doing. Not what I knew. Twelve per cent of a company's debt, with more on the way, and somebody already understood that the debt was only the start. That I wasn't buying a company at all.

I was buying a weapon.

And whoever slid this under my door knew exactly what it would do when it went off.