Chapter 5 - The Letter Daniel Burned)
Daniel returned home while Emily was upstairs packing.
She heard him speaking sharply to Melissa in the driveway, then the front door slammed. Nora remained at the foot of the stairs with her phone ready.
Daniel appeared in the bedroom doorway. He had not shaved. The green plaid shirt he wore was the same one from dinner, wrinkled now beneath a dark jacket.
"You brought a witness?" he asked.
"I brought a friend. The fact that she needs to be a witness is your contribution."
His gaze moved to the suitcase. "Don't do this."
"You did this. I am packing."
"I panicked last night. I thought ending it in front of everyone would keep it controlled."
Emily stopped folding a sweater. "You wanted an audience so I would be too humiliated to ask questions."
"Melissa said it would be cleaner."
"Melissa seems to say many things you obey."
He sat on the edge of the bed, pressing his palms together. "The company is weeks from default. The merger is the only way to save it. Your shares complicated the deal, and you refused to discuss selling last year."
"You never told me there was a deal."
"Because every financial conversation with you becomes a judgment."
"I found fraud in four hours, Daniel. Maybe you felt judged because you knew I would see it."
His head lifted. Fear moved across his face before anger covered it.
"Grace had no right to show you confidential records."
"I own thirty-two percent of the company."
"On paper."
Emily stared at him. "My father's death paid your employees when the Mercers could not. Do not reduce that to paper."
Daniel looked away.
She held up Thomas's torn envelope. "What was in this?"
For the first time, he looked truly ashamed.
"A letter."
"Where is it?"
"Gone."
"What did it say?"
Daniel stood and walked toward the window. "Dad wrote it after he amended the trust. He said you had protected this family more faithfully than either of his children. He said if I ever treated your loyalty like weakness, I would prove I wasn't fit to lead the company."
The room became very quiet.
"Why is it gone?" Emily asked.
"I burned it."
Nora swore softly from the hall.
Daniel turned. "I found it after the funeral. I was grieving. I had spent my entire life trying to earn one sentence like that from him, and he left it for you."
"So you destroyed the last words he wrote to me."
"Yes."
He did not excuse it. The admission was clean and terrible.
Emily closed her suitcase. "Are you having an affair with Avery?"
Daniel covered his face for a moment. "It started three months ago."
"How many times?"
"Emily."
"How many?"
"I don't know."
"Then enough that counting stopped mattering."
He reached for her. She stepped back.
"Avery told me you were preparing to leave," he said. "She said you met Nathan secretly before Dad died. She showed me photographs of you with another man. Melissa said you had been moving money into a private account."
"And you believed them?"
"I believed what made my anger easier."
At least that answer was honest.
"Did you forge my signature?"
"No. Melissa said you had signed the authorization and changed your mind. She brought me the completed page."
"Did you ask me?"
"No."
"Did you give her your token?"
"Sometimes. When I was traveling."
Daniel had not designed the theft. He had done something more ordinary and, in its way, more unforgivable: he had refused to look at anything that threatened his comfort.
Emily picked up the suitcase. "The paternity test is next week. You will receive the result through Grace."
His eyes filled. "You think I would accuse you?"
"I think you already chose strangers' evidence over my word once. I am preparing for the second time."
As she reached the door, Daniel said, "Melissa told me the baby might not be mine before you arrived at dinner."
Emily turned.
"How could she know there was a baby?"
"She said she saw an appointment on an insurance statement. She thought you were hiding it because of an affair."
Emily's appointment had been paid privately. No insurance claim existed.
She remembered the missing envelope, the company token, and Melissa standing in her kitchen as though she belonged there.
"She didn't see a statement," Emily said. "She was following me."
Nora's phone buzzed. She looked at the screen, then held it out.
A local gossip account had posted photographs of Emily leaving Dr. Harlow's clinic with Nathan Brooks.
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Nathan's face was blurred by motion. The caption identified him as Emily's secret lover.
The photographs had been uploaded three minutes earlier.
