Page 82 of His Daughter

She nodded. She wrapped both hands around the mug. "I know."

"And the mediation is this afternoon."

"I know." She turned her head and looked at me. Her dark eyes were serious. The shadows underneath them were lighter than they used to be. She took my hand and squeezed it. Her grip was strong. "You'll be okay."

"Will I?"

"You will. Because you don't have a choice." She squeezed again. "Now go get dressed before your daughter realizes you're not in there worshipping at her throne."

The Vanguard lobby was quiet at 7:30 a.m. The receptionist wasn't at the desk yet. The cleaning crew was finishing in the elevator bank. I rode up alone and stepped onto the executive floor, and Nolan and Julian were standing in the hallway outside the conference room.

Nolan was in his usual black. No accessories. His face was set in the expression that meant he'd been working through the night and had arrived at conclusions he wasn't going to soften. Julian was beside him, sleeves rolled, tie loosened, two coffees in hand. He held one out to me.

"You look like you need this."

"I need several of these." I took the coffee. "Talk to me."

Julian glanced at Nolan. Nolan gave a barely perceptible nod. They walked me into the conference room. The table was covered — printouts, email transcripts, financial records, a laptop open to a spreadsheet with highlighted cells.

"We spent the night on this," Julian said. He pulled a chair out and sat. "We know you've been dealing with the custody situation and the lawyers, so we handled the Graham audit ourselves."

I sat across from them and set my coffee down. "What did you find?"

Nolan spoke first. His voice was level. No emotion. Just facts delivered like ammunition.

"An LLC. Registered six months ago under a shell name — Halcyon Strategic Partners. The filing address is an office suite downtown. Fourteenth floor, Chambers Street. Graham signed the lease in January."

I stared at him. "Six months."

"He wasn't planning to leave," Julian said. He slid a printout across the table — the LLC registration, Graham's signature at the bottom. "He was planning to compete. We found correspondence on his devices — emails to potential investors, pitch decks, a client list." Julian paused. "Declan, the client list is our client list. Vanguard relationships. Current ones. He pulled contact information, deal histories, and financial models from our servers and stored them on a personal drive."

I picked up the printout. The signature was Graham's.

"The Caine deal," I said. "Was that him?"

Julian pulled up an email chain on the laptop and turned the screen toward me. Messages from Graham's personal email address to three potential investors, referencing Halcyon by name. The dates matched the final review period of the Caine documentation.

"He let the inflated numbers through on purpose," Julian said. "Not fabricated — he didn't create the fraud. Caine did that. But Graham had the documentation. He reviewed it. He told you it was clean in thirty minutes." Julian sat back. "A botched acquisition damages our reputation. Nervous clients become available clients. He was engineering our stumble so he could catch the people who fell."

The conference room was quiet. The morning light came through the glass walls in long, pale bars. I looked at the email chain. The LLC filing. The client list with names I recognized — men and women I'd sat across from, shaken hands with, closed deals with.

"And Kira?" I asked.

Nolan slid a financial statement across the table. A discretionary operations account — the fund I'd authorized for building expenses, travel, client entertainment. The statement was highlighted in three places. A single withdrawal. A check number. A date that matched the security footage timestamp.

"The payment to Kira came from this account," Nolan said. "Graham controlled it. No authorization from you is on file. No signature. No approval chain. He wrote the check and walked her out of the building using a fund he managed independently."

I looked at the statement. The amount. The date. The account I'd given Graham access to because I trusted him to manage the operational details.

"He paid off the mother of my child with my building's entertainment budget."

Nolan said nothing. Julian said nothing. The fact sat on the table with the documents.

I picked up my coffee. It was cold. I drank it anyway.

"Bring him in."

Graham walked into the conference room at 8:15 a.m. He sat in the chair across from me, set his tablet on the table, and folded his hands. He looked at the three of us — me in the center, Nolan to my left, Julian to my right.