Chapter 4 - The Price of Watching
I did not return to the café.
I walked four blocks before I realized I'd left my coffee untouched and my scarf hanging on the chair.
Lucia texted an hour later to say she'd kept it.
I couldn't decide whether the gesture was tender or unbearable.
At the storage unit I emptied the last two boxes from my father's old office.
I found repair receipts, baseball tickets, envelopes full of paid bills, and a picture of Daniel carrying me on his shoulders at Coney Island.
I kept that photograph.
A person who lied about my mother could also have loved me on a summer afternoon.
I refused to erase either fact.
There was no blue tin.
Only a faint rectangular stain on a shelf, surrounded by dust.
Somebody had removed a box from that exact spot recently.
The storage supervisor showed me the entry records because the unit was in my name.
Daniel's access card had been used six weeks earlier.
Daniel had been dead for four years.
The card still existed in my wallet, where I kept it as a memento.
I pulled it out and showed him.
"Then somebody copied the credentials or used another authorized card," he said.
He wouldn't speculate further.
He agreed to preserve the entrance video pending a proper request, but said older recordings rotated out after thirty days.
I had waited too long even to look for the box.
At home I opened my messages from Adrian.
There was one, sent after our meeting at the steakhouse.
Please let me know you're safe. I can provide records through counsel.
I wrote back: Why did you pay someone to monitor Lucia every year?
He called within five minutes.
"Your mother believes I sent people?"
"She has receipts from investigators who visited her. She didn't know their employer."
Adrian didn't say no.
"My father ordered reports after the settlement," he said. "He wanted to know whether she'd reconnected with the workers who complained."
"And you let him?"
"The family business was his until nine years ago."
"That doesn't answer whether you let him."
The silence told me I had finally asked a question he couldn't purchase his way around.
"I read the reports," he admitted. "At first. I told myself they ensured she was safe. I stopped when I learned her attorney had asked us to leave her alone."
"Did your father stop?"
"I don't know."
"Then tell me who hired them."
Adrian gave me the name of a defunct investigations firm and agreed to send the payment records his company still held.
I asked why he was suddenly so cooperative.
"Winston is dead," he said. "And I no longer have the excuse of obeying him."
I wanted that answer to be enough.
It wasn't.
Rachel helped me draft a records request to the company and a preservation notice for the storage facility.
Pilar came to my apartment with a folder of schedules showing service-charge deductions she said weren't reflected in our pay statements.
"This isn't about your mother," she said, "but it's the same company telling workers they should be grateful to have jobs."
I was exhausted by how many problems one name could contain.
"I can't be the person who fixes everything," I said.
"I know. That's why I brought copies and talked to the others."
The staff had already begun comparing records.
I could help by identifying a lawyer; I didn't need to speak for every employee.
The next morning Adrian invited me to the company's downtown office with Rachel present.
He showed us a ledger containing payments to Winston's investigators, including a report dated the month after Daniel died.
The report stated that Lucia was working in Louisville, had married no one, and had asked an attorney whether her daughter was alive and well.
"You knew she'd been trying to find me," I said.
Adrian looked miserable.
"The report came to my office, not directly to me. My staff flagged it as closed litigation. I didn't read it until last week."
I didn't believe that offices functioned like magical boxes that kept secrets without a person deciding which letters mattered.
"Who made it closed litigation?"
He opened another file.
There was a signature at the bottom of the instruction.
Not Winston's.
May you like
Nathan Ellis, the maître d' who'd fired me for breaking a glass, had been working in the company's legal administration before taking the restaurant job.
And the instruction was dated only six weeks earlier.
