The First Audit
Chapter 10 - The First Audit
Anne Keller was fifty-eight and had worked for the Morettis since she left business school. She had never married, lived with two elderly dachshunds, and kept a calendar so crowded that people joked she could schedule a thunderstorm. She also knew exactly how much money Rafe Moretti had moved through companies that existed only on paper.
When Lydia asked to speak with her, Anne agreed at once. They met in an office borrowed from an accounting firm with no ties to the Morettis. Nora sat opposite her, studying the woman who had seemed to be the single clear voice in Dominic's tangled world.
"My father wrote your name in his last letter," Nora began.
Anne inhaled slowly. "I thought he might."
"What happened to the first audit?"
Anne opened her briefcase and removed a thick binder bound with red string. "I kept it. I should have given it to investigators sixteen years ago. Instead I accepted the company's counsel's advice that it was incomplete and therefore dangerous to circulate. The second version removed every reference to the storage cages and the chained exit. I signed that version as if it were the only one."
"Why?"
"I wanted to keep my job. I wanted to believe the lawyer when he said a flawed inquiry could destroy innocent people. But I knew the first report was more accurate, and I put it in a safe instead of saying so."
Nora was tired of confessions. Each one made the world a little more truthful and her childhood a little sadder. She looked at the binder. "Did my father know you had it?"
"Yes. I gave him a summary. He begged me to make it public. I told him there were procedures. Then he died, and I told myself I'd missed my chance."
"You didn't miss your chance," Nora said. "You declined it."
Anne accepted the correction. Her hands stayed folded on the table while Lydia arranged the transfer of the original report to independent investigators. There was a receipt, a written account of where Anne had stored it, and a list of people who might challenge its authenticity. All the dull machinery Nora had begun to respect because it was harder to manipulate than a powerful man's promise.
The binder revealed that Harbor Point's fire exit had been used to store imported goods for months. Rafe's company collected a fee for the unauthorized storage. Several workers had complained. Adrian ordered the cages removed, but his order had been delayed. A later entry recorded that he intended to speak to the city inspectors himself.
Three days afterward, the fire began in an electrical cabinet near the loading bay. The cause had never been conclusively established. The blocked stair, however, had prevented workers from escaping. Whether the fire was accidental was still a question. The obstruction was not.
Nora studied the names of the four men who died. She had known them as newspaper photographs and figures in an old lawsuit. Now she saw their recorded shifts, their signed complaints, the mundane evidence of lives that had expected to continue after work. One had taken two hours of leave for his daughter's school play. Another had requested new gloves from a supervisor who told him to buy his own.
"I don't want the story to become only about my father," she said. "Those families deserve their own hearing."
Anne's eyes filled. "They do."
At the same time, Dominic met with a special committee of the Moretti board. He had stepped aside from day-to-day management while the review continued. His attorneys warned him that a statement acknowledging he had signed the safety acceptance might expose him to civil claims. He made it anyway, in a sworn interview with investigators, accompanied by counsel.
He did not say he was innocent. He said what he had done, what he had failed to check, and when he had first learned the facts. He also explained why he had gone to Nora's fundraiser years earlier. His lawyer raised an eyebrow at that irrelevant detail. Dominic said it was relevant to his reasons for delaying disclosure, and he wanted the record to be clear.
By evening, news of the reopened inquiry had reached the city press. An old photograph of Dominic beside Rafe appeared online under a headline about the Moretti empire's troubled past. Another article mentioned the canceled wedding and claimed that Nora had threatened to expose confidential records unless Dominic paid her. The allegation was false, and its source anonymous.
Nora's first impulse was to telephone Dominic. She stopped herself. Then she called Lydia, who documented the publication and requested a correction. She did not want a public romance used as proof that a working woman's motives were suspect. Ruth read the article and said, with magnificent contempt, "Men have accused women of scheming for money since the invention of money. That doesn't make them imaginative."
Vivienne arrived in Port Haven the next morning without diamonds or an entourage. Rose sat in the car with a book, visible from the window. Vivienne had asked Lydia for permission to speak, and Nora had agreed to ten minutes on Ruth's front porch.
"I lied at the rehearsal dinner," Vivienne said. "I said Rose might be Dominic's. I knew she was Adrian's. Rafe paid me to cause a delay. I told myself I was buying time to get Rose out of the city."
"You could have asked me for help."
"Would you have believed me?"
Nora considered it. "I don't know. But that was my decision to make, not yours."
Vivienne nodded. She looked toward the parked car. "I used to think Dominic was the life I should have had. It took me a long time to understand that I wanted the security his family could provide, not the man himself. I'm ashamed of what I did to you."
"You should be."
"I am."
They stood in the cold for another moment. Nora did not embrace her. She did, however, ask whether Rose was attending school and whether Vivienne had a safe place to live. There was no contradiction in caring about a child and refusing to excuse her mother's conduct.
A week later the company announced that Rafe had been removed from his executive position. Investigators sought records of the old pier contracts and the payments to Vivienne. The news was not a verdict. Lydia reminded Nora of that whenever the papers grew too certain.
Then a letter arrived from a preservation foundation in Paris. Nora had applied months earlier for a six-month residency to study the restoration of nineteenth-century architectural glass. She had nearly forgotten the application in the chaos of the wedding. They offered her a place, a modest stipend, and a room near the workshop.
She carried the letter into Ruth's kitchen, where Ruth was repairing a torn apron with blue thread.
"It's Paris," Nora said. "They want me."
Ruth looked at her for a moment, then smiled. "Well, darling. Perhaps it's time somebody did."
Nora laughed, and then, quite unexpectedly, she cried. She had been measuring her future by the size of what she'd lost. The letter offered a future that had nothing to do with anyone else's guilt.
May you like
That evening, after booking the flight, she found a small envelope tucked inside the back cover of her father's portfolio. It was addressed to her in her mother's handwriting. On the flap, beneath the old adhesive, were five words she had not seen before.
*Open this when you choose yourself.*
