Chapter 57: An Old Friend
Liam!, Find something interesting in the trash?" Evelyn called, blanket rolled under one arm, keys already in hand.
"Just an overpriced coffee going to waste." He left the cup where it was and caught up with her, scanning the boardwalk one more time out of habit rather than expectation.
Whoever the woman had been, she wasn’t coming back to claim it.They were almost to the car when the voice caught up to them instead.
"Evelyn?"
Both of them turned. The woman crossing the parking lot toward them was unmistakably the same one sunglasses pushed up into dark hair now.
"Rowena?" Evelyn’s surprise sounded entirely genuine, her whole posture warming instantly. "I didn’t know you came out this far."
"I don’t, usually." Rowena’s gaze slid to Liam and stayed there a beat longer than a stranger’s should. "Small world. You’re about the last person I expected to run into at Crescent Point."
"Playing hooky, technically." Evelyn gestured at the sand still clinging to her ankles. "Liam, this is Rowena law school, if either of us can believe we survived it. Rowena, this is Liam."
"Charmed." Rowena put out a hand, and Liam shook it, keeping his face pleasant while something colder settled underneath it. Her grip was firm, deliberate the handshake of someone used to reading people in the first three seconds. "Funny thing. I’ve been hearing your name a lot this week, Liam. And I don’t think it was from you."
Evelyn’s brow creased. "You two know each other?"We’re about to," Rowena said, not looking away from him. Aren’t we?
Liam held her gaze evenly. "Depends what you think you know."
"Oh, I know plenty." She folded her arms, clearly enjoying herself now. "I know somebody’s been asking a receptionist about an old lease.
I know somebody spent an afternoon getting cozy with a shopkeeper who’s suddenly very informed about foot traffic.
And I know somebody tailed a man with a limp and a bad habit of checking reflections all the way to a building on the east side a man I’ve been keeping an eye on myself, for entirely different reasons."
She tilted her head. "Care to save us both some time, or would you rather I keep guessing out loud?
Evelyn looked between them, "Liam. What is she talking about?"He exhaled slowly. There was no version of this where pretending helped him now.
Rowena had already assembled enough to make denial embarrassing rather than useful, and lying to Evelyn’s face while she stood there watching wasn’t a door he was willing to walk through, not after everything the last few weeks had actually been.
"I’ve been investigating your husband," he said.The words landed flatly between them, and for a moment nobody moved.
"Why?" Evelyn’s voice had gone very quiet.
Liam looked at her, and decided, for the first time since this whole thing began, to give someone the entire truth instead of the useful parts of it. "There was a woman who used to work for him. Grace.
Your husband was very cruel and mean to her he always wanted to take advantage of her cause of what she’s going through he first refused to pay he her salary, which I helped her out with the help of a good friend of mine.
But just days later I noticed that she resigned cause your husband was making things more tough for her and she couldn’t take it anymore she’s broken as we are talking right now i just pray she doesn’t decides do end her life
Evelyn didn’t say anything. Her jaw tightened.
So I started looking into him," Liam went on. "Small things at first. Then I found a man who shouldn’t exist Adrian Voss, a name attached to companies that don’t seem to actually employ him.
Then a shell company called Eastbridge Logistics that vanished overnight. Then someone watching that empty office, closely enough that his whole routine broke the day I started asking questions."
He paused. "I should have told you. I didn’t, because I wasn’t sure yet what I was dragging you into. I’m sorry for that."
Rowena, for once, didn’t say anything sarcastic. She just watched Evelyn with the careful patience of someone who’d been waiting for this exact moment for longer than she’d let on.
Evelyn was quiet for a long moment, staring out at the water rather than at either of them. When she finally spoke, her voice had lost its earlier lightness entirely.
"I already knew something was wrong." She said it like an admission she’d been holding back for months. "Not what, not who. Just a feeling.
The kind you get from someone you’ve shared a house with for years, when the small things stop adding up the way they used to." She glanced at Rowena.
"I asked her to look, six months ago. I told myself I didn’t want to know unless there was something real. I think I was hoping there wouldn’t be."
"There is," Rowena said gently. "I was going to bring it to you this week regardless."
Evelyn closed her eyes briefly, then opened them, and whatever had been sitting on her shoulders seemed to settle into something steadier, more decided. "Then I think we’d better not do this in a parking lot."
She led them to her car a heavy, matte-black Mercedes-Benz S600 Guard, the armored model her office had quietly assigned her after a threat two years back and never bothered reclaiming, thick-glassed and solid enough that the door shut behind them with the dull, final thud of a bank vault rather than a car. Inside, the outside world went almost entirely silent.
"Nobody listens in here," Evelyn said, catching Liam’s glance at the windows. "One of the few perks of the job that actually feels like one."
Rowena settled into the front passenger seat, angling herself back to face them both. "All right. Let’s actually compare notes, since apparently we’ve been running the same race without telling each other." She looked at Liam. "Everything. Start to finish."
He gave it to her in full this time the photographs, the pattern of Voss appearing at the edge of every Harper Linguistics event, the procurement filings with his name attached to three unrelated companies.
The abandoned office at Suite 406, the newspaper contradiction naming Meridian Supply Group in the same space the same year, the watcher with the limp whose routine had broken the exact day Liam went looking, the building on the eighth floor with no name on the directory.
When he finished, Rowena exhaled, almost impressed despite herself. You’ve been busy for someone with no legal standing to do any of this."I didn’t need standing. I needed answers."
"Well, you’re about to get some help with the rest." She pulled a slim folder from her bag and set it on the console between them. "That man you followed works for Kestrel Risk Advisory.
They’re on retainer to Harper Linguistics quietly, off the books, paid through a consulting line that doesn’t show up on the public filings.
Voss isn’t freelance. He’s theirs. And Eastbridge Logistics was never a real logistics company it was a pass-through, moving money in and out of Harper Linguistics before the redevelopment forced it to close." She tapped the folder. "It’s taken me four months to get this far. You got most of the way there in two weeks."
Liam looked at the folder, then at Evelyn, who hadn’t said a word through the entire recitation, her hands folded tightly in her lap.
"I want to ask you for something," he said finally. "Grace deserves better than what happened to her. I don’t know exactly what that looks like yet, but I’d like your help making sure she gets the justice she deserves.
Evelyn didn’t answer right away. She looked down at her hands, then out through the thick, silent glass at the last of the evening light over the dunes, and for a moment Liam thought she might simply say no.
"I can’t promise you anything sitting in a car in a beach parking lot," she said finally, quieter than before. "Come to the house tonight. All three of us can talk properly, with actual documents in front of us instead of a folder on a console."
She looked at him. "I need a little time to think about what I’m willing to do here. But I’m not going to pretend I don’t want to know either."
"Tonight works," Liam said.
Liam climbed out into the cooling evening air a few minutes later, the heavy door closing behind him with the same solid, muffled thud, and started back toward the bus stop and the café waiting for him across town.
Somewhere behind him, in that silent, armored car, two women were beginning a conversation eleven years in the making and for the first time since Grace had resigned, Liam felt something other than patience settle into place.It felt, almost, like the beginning of an ending.