Chapter 10 - The Money Still at Risk
Dana kept her finger beside the Cedar Row receipt dates. The first was only days away.
I had been thinking about money we might lose. Now I was thinking about money the firm had not even collected.
“Could Lark take the rent before it reaches us?” I asked.
Claire turned the agreement back to its first page.
“Not because this schedule says so. We need the complete agreement, evidence that anyone with authority signed it, and the records behind this proposed claim. Right now, we have part of a document Sloane brought us.”
Sloane looked down at her hands. I could see the marks where she had gripped the folder.
“Grant sent it to me so I could fill in the forecast,” she said. “I printed what he sent.”
“Was there a signature page?” Claire asked.
“Not in my copy.”
“Did you see one anywhere else?”
“No.”
Claire placed the pages in order. One section referred to a milestone schedule we did not have. Another referred to a notice to tenants that Sloane said she had never seen. The paragraph about receipts described a possible arrangement; it did not show whether the arrangement had ever been completed.
Still, Grant had asked for dates. That fact sat on the table with the paper.
Claire asked Sloane to show us the message that had carried the attachment. Sloane opened her work email on her phone without handing it over, and read out the date and subject while Dana compared them with the printout. Claire noted what we had seen and asked Sloane not to delete or alter the original message.
“Does Lark know about this schedule?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Sloane said.
“Who at Lark did you work with?”
“A general account address. Someone signed messages ‘Client Services.’ I never met them.”
For a moment, I heard Grant at Bellwether again, offering Simon ten thousand dollars to put words on paper that were not true. The difference was that Simon had refused before a false account existed. Here, money had already left the firm, and the papers in front of us did not yet explain why.
Dana drew the paid Lark entry closer. The $9,640 remained marked as sent. The new schedule described different charges. She wrote *separate* between the two documents.
“We shouldn’t turn a proposed obligation into a completed payment,” she said. “Or use uncertainty about this agreement to dismiss the payment that did happen.”
She opened the records she had assembled that morning. Mara Ellis’s invoice for early Cedar Row concepts matched work Mara had described. An older Harbor Street campaign had photographs and print ads we could identify. Dana set those pages to one side.
Then she laid out three Cedar Row entries from the marketing records. One described final storefront artwork. Mara had said she made only rough concepts before her assignment ended. Another billed outreach preparation, but the supporting folder contained a proposed schedule, not evidence of contacts made. The third had a description broad enough to cover almost anything and no deliverable attached in the records available to us.
“We need to ask for what’s missing,” Dana said. “A different designer might have finished the art. The outreach may have happened through a channel we haven’t checked.”
Sloane stared at the first two entries.
“I approved those descriptions,” she said.
The office went quiet.
“Which descriptions?” Claire asked.
“The artwork and outreach preparation. Marketing sent them along with the invoices.”
“Did you know they overstated the work?”
Sloane pressed her lips together. “I knew Mara’s concepts weren’t final artwork. I knew we had a proposed outreach schedule, not a completed push. I told myself the descriptions were close enough because Grant kept saying the campaign would catch up.”
“Did you authorize the payments?” Dana asked.
“I approved the descriptions from my department. I didn’t release money from the bank.”
She looked at me.
“That isn’t an excuse. I let the papers say more than we had done.”
At Bellwether, she had laughed when Grant asked a stranger to lie about me. Yesterday, if she had come to my door with this admission, I might have wanted nothing except to see her lose her job. In Claire’s office, I could not forget what she had done. I also could not pretend her admission answered questions she did not know the answers to.
“Why tell us now?” I asked.
“Because I saw that agreement and realized the invoices might not be the end of it.” She swallowed. “And because I heard what Grant asked Simon to do. I went home with him anyway.”
I thought of Simon, who had been offered enough money to make refusing costly. He had refused. Sloane had made a different choice. Telling the truth now mattered, but it did not make the earlier choice disappear.
Claire asked her to identify every message she had sent about the disputed descriptions. Sloane gave dates where she could remember them and said she would preserve the messages in her work account. Claire explained that we would need to check them against company records, including any replies or attachments she had not printed.
“We’ll record what you know,” Claire said. “We won’t ask you to guess about Grant or Lark.”
Sloane gave a small, unhappy nod.
Dana returned to the receipt forecast. Cedar Row had storefront leases, not just a marketing budget. Rent would be used to keep the property running. There were bills for maintenance, utilities, and the people who handled tenants’ calls. Payroll for the wider firm was coming, too.
“We need to know whether any request tied to Lark is in the payables queue,” Dana said. “And we need to know what money is needed for ordinary obligations. Those are different questions.”
My phone was beside the agreement. Grant’s photograph from Bellwether had already gone to the other firm members. I could send a photograph of these pages just as easily. I pictured the replies arriving before anyone had checked whether the agreement was signed. Someone would call Grant a thief. Someone would call me hysterical again. By morning, the people at Cedar Row might be wondering whether their paychecks would clear.
“I could tell the members about Sloane’s admission,” I said.
“You can tell them verified, relevant facts through a careful process,” Claire said. “But not that Lark has seized rent, or that Grant stole it. We can’t support either statement.”
“What if waiting lets him do it?”
“Then we act on the pending risk we can establish. We don’t have to win an argument in public first.”
She requested the complete Lark agreement, any signature pages, milestone submissions, and notices concerning Cedar Row receipts through the firm’s records process. Dana asked for the payables queue and the ordinary cash schedule. Claire also followed up on the fuller February 5 sign-in history. The desktop assigned to Grant’s office remained a lead, not a person identified at the keyboard.
Sloane watched Claire send the requests.
“Will Grant know I came here?”
“He may,” Claire said. “I can’t promise otherwise.”
Sloane nodded slowly. “I’d rather know that.”
After she left, I walked to the office window. From there, I could see people crossing at the light, coats pulled tight, each of them going somewhere that had nothing to do with my marriage. A woman held the door of a delivery van while the driver balanced two boxes against his chest.
For years, Grant had called me his little bookkeeper. He meant that I could be trusted with columns but not decisions. Yet every number Dana checked had a person waiting at the other end of it: a designer owed for actual work, a tenant expecting a maintained storefront, a worker expecting Friday’s wages.
I had sixty percent of the voting interests. That did not tell me which button I could press tonight. I wanted Claire to show me the proper way before I pressed any of them.
Dana came to stand beside me.
“You weren’t wrong to ask about the rent,” she said.
“I was ready to believe the worst thing that page suggested.”
“You asked before you said it was true.”
That should not have felt like an accomplishment. After months of Grant dismissing every question I raised, it did.
Near the end of the afternoon, Dana’s request produced an ordinary payables report. She called me back to the table. The schedule showed payroll and several project bills expected in the next run, each on its own line. It also showed no rent redirected to Lark. At least, there was no such instruction in the records we had been given.
Then Dana scrolled down.
A new request had appeared after the report was generated. She refreshed the authorized queue view to confirm it was still there.
Lark Strategies. Cedar Row. Eighteen thousand four hundred dollars.
The description said *outreach milestone balance*. An attached reference pointed to the agreement we had only seen in part. The approval field named Grant. Its status was *pending*, not paid.
“What does pending mean here?” I asked.
Dana checked the next column. “It’s listed for tomorrow morning’s payment run. We need the person responsible for that run to confirm exactly what happens next.”
Claire was already reaching for her phone. She would ask about a hold on this specific request without interfering with payroll or legitimate project bills. She would not promise me it could be done until she knew who had authority to do it.
May you like
I looked at the other lines in the queue, then back at Lark’s. We still lacked the complete agreement. We still had no proof that its stated milestone had been met.
The request was scheduled to go out at eight the next morning.
