Chapter 4: The Tower’s Missing Records
Rachel called a neighbor to sit with Fiona and Leo while I grabbed my coat. I didn’t tell the children we were going to the tower; I only said I’d be back as soon as I could. Fiona watched me from the den doorway, one hand on Leo’s shoulder, and I hated that my leaving had begun to look like another thing they had to endure.
The tower’s side entrance stood open when we arrived. A white van waited at the curb, its rear doors yawning beneath the gray afternoon sky. One of the boxes from the photograph was already inside.
Rachel reached the entrance first. “Stop loading.”
A man with a dolly glanced at her, then at me. “We have authorization.”
“From whom?” I asked.
“Mr. Morgan.”
The name came out easily, like a key he expected to fit every lock in the building.
I stepped around the dolly and looked into the van. Boxes crowded the floor, their cardboard sides bare of labels. The open one on top held folders with tenant names visible along their tabs.
“Those are building records,” I said.
The man’s expression tightened. “We were told they were being moved.”
“By whom?”
He looked past me toward the lobby, where the building manager was hurrying over. “I’m not getting into that.”
“You already are,” Rachel said.
The manager, Mr. Bell, reached us with his phone in hand. His face was flushed from the cold—or from seeing me. “Ms. Morgan. I was trying to confirm the instruction before I stopped them.”
“Did you authorize this?”
“No. I received a call saying your husband had arranged a records transfer. I asked for written confirmation. They said it was coming.”
The man beside the van shifted his grip on the dolly. He wasn’t wearing a company uniform, and the driver kept his face turned toward the windshield.
“You can leave the boxes here,” I said.
The man gave a short, disbelieving laugh. “You can’t just—”
“I can tell you not to carry tenant files out of my building.”
He looked at Rachel. She said nothing. The manager moved between the dolly and the van, no longer waiting for someone else to decide.
For one breath, the man seemed ready to argue. Then he let go of the handle. The dolly clattered against the curb.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Tell Luca you delayed it.”
“I will.”
He climbed into the passenger seat. The driver shut the van doors, and they pulled away without the boxes.
The records sat in the lobby beneath a buzzing fluorescent light. I could smell wet wool from our coats and the dusty paper inside the open carton. I had inherited the tower hours ago, but its tenants had been living inside its consequences long before I knew my name was attached to it.
Mr. Bell led us upstairs to his office. He kept apologizing as he unlocked his computer, although he hadn’t let them take the boxes. I wished he would stop. The people who’d arranged this counted on everyone being so worried about being wrong that no one dared to act.
“I saved the visitor reports,” he said. “The archive room has an access log. I thought the entries looked strange, so I printed them.”
Rachel leaned over the pages. “When were these?”
“After hours. Several nights over the last two weeks.”
Mr. Bell tapped a line near the bottom. The same two names appeared on multiple dates, each time with the company listed as Luca Morgan Consulting.
I read them twice. Luca had always said his associates were juggling client work and late calls. Now their names sat beside the archive door, arriving after staff had gone home.
“They said they were checking lease materials,” Mr. Bell said. “I didn’t know they were taking anything.”
“Did they have permission to enter the archive?” Rachel asked.
He hesitated. “They had a temporary access code. It was requested under the consulting company’s name.”
The van outside had been carrying tenant files. The logs showed Luca’s business associates inside the archive after hours. It wasn’t proof of what had been taken or why, but the pieces were no longer scattered across different rooms.
A knock sounded at the office door. A woman in a dark green coat stood there, clutching a folded notice against her chest. Behind her, another tenant waited in the hall.
“I heard you stopped them,” she said. Her eyes moved from me to the visitor log. “Are you the new owner?”
“I’m Jessi Morgan.”
She looked down at the paper in her hands. “Then maybe you can tell me why your husband’s people have been asking us to leave.”
Rachel straightened. “Who has been asking you?”
“Someone from a company called Harborlight Renewal. They offered money if we signed quickly and promised to vacate our space by the end of the month.” She unfolded the notice. “They said the offer wouldn’t last.”
The tenant in the hall came in, jaw tight. “They told me the building was changing hands. That I’d be foolish to wait.”
“I never said the building was changing hands,” I said.
“No,” the woman replied. “That’s why I came up here.”
Her voice wasn’t loud, but it carried the tired edge of someone who had spent days deciding whether she was being unreasonable for mistrusting a stranger’s promises. I thought of the letter in Luca’s hand on our porch, of the life he’d tried to make me believe I had no right to question.
“I’m sorry you were put in that position,” I said. “You don’t have to sign anything today.”
Her shoulders lowered a fraction. Not relief, exactly. Room to breathe.
Rachel asked to see the notice. Harborlight Renewal’s name appeared at the top. Below it was a Manhattan address, printed in small type.
I felt the air leave my lungs.
Mr. Bell slid a copy of the notice across the desk. Rachel opened her folder and set down a page from the altered consent packet. Harborlight Renewal appeared there, too—beside a line that had not appeared on the original document.
The same name. Two different papers. One company Jessi had never heard of until that moment.
Rachel didn’t touch either page. “We need to know what’s connected and what isn’t.”
“I know.” I stared at the address beneath the company name. “Where did they say this company was based?”
The tenant pointed to the notice. “That’s the address they gave us.”
I knew the street. I knew the suite number.
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It was the address on Luca’s consulting invoices, the office where he had once asked me to bring him dinner because he’d be working past midnight. I had stood under its brass directory with a paper bag in my hands, proud of how hard he was working for our family.
Now the shell company named on the tenant notices and in the lender’s packet led straight to Luca’s consulting office.
