Chapter 6
The morning light in our apartment was too clean for what I was carrying. It came in through the east window and cut straight across the dining table, catching dust in the air and making everything look exposed. Maya had already spread everything out before I was fully awake — her laptop open, her phone with the gala photos, and the Whitmore program budget sheet the events coordinator had slipped into her tote at the end of the night.
She'd made coffee. I stood in the kitchen doorway with my mug and watched her.
My jacket from the night before hung over the back of the dining chair. The black wool with the gold embroidery on the collar looked wrong in daylight. My watch was still on my left wrist. My phone was heavy in my pocket. The transfer had gone through at 2:13 a.m. I'd watched the confirmation come in while Maya slept beside me.
Maya didn't look up at first. She was scrolling with two fingers, enlarging a photo of the main ballroom. In it she was smiling next to the donor wall, holding the oversized check for the youth arts program. Her program.
"Look how nice these came out," she said. "The photographer got the lighting right for once."
I came closer and set my mug down. "You look good. Tired, but good."
"I was tired," she said. She clicked over to another tab, a PDF scan of the budget sheet. She had a notebook next to it where she'd been doing math in her small, neat numbers. "Can you look at this with me for a second? Something's not matching."
I felt my shoulders tighten. I tried to keep my breathing even.
She turned the sheet toward me. Pledged donations: $1.2 million. Below that, line items for the programs, including hers at $480,000. And then a handwritten note at the bottom in the coordinator's writing: deposited to date $800,000.
"See this?" she said, tapping the numbers with her pen. "Pledged versus deposited. That's a $400,000 gap. That's not small. That's my whole expansion. That's two teaching artists for a year and the instruments."
I stared at it. The numbers were exact. The discrepancy she'd just found was the same amount my father had told me was short after two donors pulled out last week. The amount he'd asked me to cover with a forged transfer from the general endowment.
"Maybe it's just pledges that haven't cleared," I said. My voice sounded normal. I was proud of that. "Gala night's always messy with the accounting."
Maya frowned. "But four hundred thousand? That's a third. And they printed this this morning. It says deposited to date." She looked up at me then. Her eyes were tired but clear. "You have the login for the foundation portal still, right? From when you helped your dad with the site? Can you check the actual ledger? It should show pending versus received."
That was the moment I had to choose how to lie.
I picked up my coffee again. My hand was steady. I didn't know how.
"The portal always lags after the gala," I said. "Every year. Dad told me they don't reconcile until Monday when the bank opens. You'll just get last week's numbers."
She tilted her head. "You've checked it before the day after, though. Last year you checked it from the couch and it was live."
I hesitated. A small pause before speaking, just long enough for it to feel considered instead of panicked.
"They changed the system this year," I said. "New vendor. It does a batch update now. Give it a day."
Maya looked back at the sheet. She ran her pen under the $800,000 line again. I could see her doing the logic in her head and not liking the answer. She believed in paperwork. She believed numbers had to balance.
"Yeah, but this is a printed sheet from this morning," she said quietly. "Someone had the real number this morning to print this. So the portal should have it too."
I didn't have anything for that. I drank my coffee to give myself a reason not to answer. The apartment was quiet except for the refrigerator humming.
My jacket still hung on the chair between us. The phone in my pocket felt like it was buzzing even though it wasn't. That transaction log was in there, in my banking app, showing the transfer I'd approved. $400,000 moved from the endowment sweep to cover the gala shortfall. If she saw it, the lag story would fall apart.
Maya closed her laptop halfway. She didn't put the budget sheet away. She folded it once and slid it into her notebook.
"Okay," she said. "I'll just call Diane directly then. She'll know. She's the accountant, she closes the books. I'll call her this morning."
I felt a drop in my stomach. "It's Sunday, Maya. She probably won't pick up."
"Then I'll leave a message," she said. She reached for her phone and looked at the time. "And if she doesn't call back by noon, I'll email her and copy your dad so there's a trail."
She said it casually, like it was just process. But I heard the shift. She wasn't going to wait for the portal to catch up. She was going around it.
I couldn't tell her not to call without sounding like I had a reason to stop her. So I nodded.
"Good idea," I said. "She'd know better than the portal anyway."
May you like
Maya smiled a little, but it didn't reach her eyes. She was already thinking past me.
"Yeah," she said, and opened her contacts.
