Chapter 4: The First Ledger
“I didn’t steal anything,” I told Owen. “The accusation is false.”
He watched me from the bedroom doorway, his small hand still wrapped around the frame.
“Then why does Dad think you did?”
“Your dad and I disagree about something that happened at Northgate. The adults are going to work it out. You don’t have to decide who’s right, and you don’t have to fix it.”
Owen studied my face, looking for the part I couldn’t put into words. I didn’t ask him to believe me over Travis. I only held his gaze until his shoulders eased a fraction.
“Can you stay until I fall asleep?”
“Yes.”
I sat beside him while the glow-in-the-dark planets on his blanket faded into the dark. When his breathing slowed, I went to the kitchen and called Miriam Dawson.
She answered on the second ring.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
So I told her about Travis’s offer, the threat wrapped inside it, and the message suspending me from work. I told her about Owen’s question, too, though my voice caught there.
Miriam didn’t rush to fill the silence.
“Don’t contact Travis tonight,” she said at last. “And don’t send him anything you find. We need evidence we can explain—not just a story that sounds true because we know him.”
“I have the transfer authorization.”
“Keep it where it is. Don’t write on it or handle it more than you have to. What we need now is something independent of Travis’s files.”
I looked toward the cupboard where I’d hidden the household binder. “Claire has a scan of the old supplier guarantee. The signature looks like the one on the authorization.”
“Looks like isn’t the same as proving where it came from.”
“I know.”
“Then let’s find out who can tell us.”
A few minutes later, I called Claire. She sounded tired, but alert—like someone listening for footsteps outside her door.
“I still have the scan,” she said. “It was in the supplier folder I found before the physical file disappeared. I haven’t found the source of the image or who put it on the transfer paperwork.”
“But you know someone who might have the original.”
There was a pause. “Rebecca Shaw. She kept duplicate supplier records when she was Northgate’s bookkeeper.”
“Why?”
“Northgate had a records dispute years ago. I don’t know the details. Rebecca was careful.”
Careful. The word brought back the woman I remembered: quiet at the end of the conference table, pencil tucked behind one ear, asking for a receipt Travis had already thrown away.
“Do you have her number?”
“I do. I’ll send it.”
My phone buzzed before we hung up. A number appeared with a message: Rebecca Shaw. Tell her I sent you.
Rebecca answered after four rings.
“Eliza?” Her voice held surprise, then a wary softness. “I heard you were back at Northgate.”
“Not by choice. I need to ask you about an old supplier guarantee.”
The silence that followed was long enough for my stomach to tighten.
“I thought that file was gone,” she said.
“The scan is still there. It looks like my signature was copied onto a transfer authorization.”
“Copied from the guarantee?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling.”
Another pause. Then Rebecca gave me the address of a storage facility and told me she could meet me there in an hour.
The unit smelled of dust and cold metal. A bare bulb swung overhead as Rebecca unlocked the door. She looked older than I remembered, her dark hair gone mostly silver, but she still held the key ring tight in her fist as if someone might try to take it.
“I kept boxes,” she said. “Duplicates. Supplier correspondence, invoices, carbon copies. Things the company was supposed to keep.”
“You didn’t trust the archive?”
“I trusted the records. I didn’t always trust the people deciding what counted as a record.”
She glanced at me, measuring how much to say. I knew the look. Years earlier, I’d seen it across the kitchen table when a supplier called about a late invoice and Travis had already gone to bed.
Rebecca pushed aside two cartons and pulled out a thin folder. “This is the supplier-credit guarantee.”
My pulse thudded against my throat.
Inside lay a yellowing carbon sheet, its creases softened by time. I recognized the form before I read the heading: Northgate’s name, the supplier’s name, the boxes for credit terms. My signature sat near the bottom, pressed into the page in blue-black ink.
I leaned closer. There was the slight break in the last stroke, the small hitch I’d seen on the transfer authorization.
But here, the pen had left a groove in the paper. The ink had bled unevenly along the line. It was a real signature—not a clean image dropped onto a new page.
For a moment, I wasn’t standing in a storage unit. I was back at our kitchen table with a mug of cold coffee beside my hand, working through figures while Travis described the client he hoped to win. The table had rocked if you leaned on one corner. I used to wedge a folded receipt under its leg and laugh that even our furniture needed a budget.
“This is the original?” I asked.
“It’s the carbon copy made at the time. I kept it with the duplicate supplier file.”
I touched the edge of the folder, careful not to touch the page. “You kept all this?”
“Not all of it.” Rebecca reached into the carton and lifted out a sealed envelope. My name was written across the front.
The handwriting wasn’t hers.
“What is that?”
“I don’t know what’s inside,” she said. “It was with the file.”
I looked at my name again. The envelope’s flap was still sealed, its paper browned at the corners. I felt the pull to open it, to find one clean answer inside all the noise.
May you like
Rebecca rested a hand on top of it.
“Before you do,” she said, “you need to understand something. Whoever left that envelope did it because they were afraid Travis would erase your work.”
