Chapter 23
Her father sat in county lockup for nine of those days.
Elena visited twice. The first time he wouldn’t look at her. The second time he did, and what she saw in his face was not gratitude but something closer to shame — the specific shame of a man who had spent twenty years choosing the wrong thing and had just been handed the bill.
“They froze everything,” he said. “My accounts. The house. Your mother’s —”
“I know.”
“Marcus told me it was a loan. A legitimate loan. He told me —”
“Dad.” She said it gently. “He told you a lot of things.”
He put his face in his hands.
On the ninth day, Rebecca filed a motion with the court and attached Exhibit Forty-One: a wire transfer log showing that the funds the state had flagged as embezzled had originated in an account controlled by Martinez Holdings, and had been routed through her father’s business with a forged signature and a backdated agreement. Marcus hadn’t just set him up. He’d done it sloppily, because he’d assumed no one would ever look.
The charges were dismissed on the tenth day.
Her father walked out of the county building into gray afternoon light, and Elena was standing on the sidewalk. He stopped when he saw her. Neither of them said anything for a while.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said.
“I know.”
“I should have — your mother would have —”
“Yeah.” Elena’s throat was tight. “She would have.”
He nodded. He didn’t ask her to forgive him, which she noted, and which she appreciated. He just stood there in his rumpled coat with his hands at his sides like a man who had run out of arguments, and eventually he said, “Where are you staying?”
“Somewhere he can’t find me.”
“Good.” He almost smiled. “Good.”
She didn’t hug him. She wasn’t there yet — maybe she never would be. But she gave him the number of a lawyer who wasn’t Rebecca, someone who could clean up the wreckage of his own finances, and she paid the retainer herself, and she watched him walk to the bus stop, and that was something.
The criminal referral came through four days later.
Rebecca had been right about the corner-cutting. Dominic had been right about the enemies. Three former partners, two city employees, and one very unhappy zoning board member had been waiting years for someone to ask them the right questions — and once the divorce filing gave them a legal reason to talk, they talked.