Page 168

Nora looks at me. “Indirectly.”

I set the photograph down beside Celeste’s notebook. “How?”

“My cousin Daniel served on the board of one of the organizations you helped. I told him Celeste’s husband was rebuilding security systems for shelters with his own money and refusing to let anybody make a fuss about it.”

Daniel Mercer’s name pulls me back to the earliest days of Wolf Shield, because he’s the man who eventually put me in a room with Richard Hale, my first serious investor and the person who looked at a rough security platform I’d built for organizations with almost no budget and decided it could become much more.

“You told Daniel about me?”

Nora nods. “He watched what you were doing for a few months, then introduced you to Richard when he heard you were trying to turn the monitoring system into a business.”

I lean back and run a hand over my mouth. Daniel introduced me to Richard because he’d been watching the shelter work long enough to know what I was building, but I’d never known what made him start watching in the first place.

Emma shifts closer beside me. “Celeste is how Nora knew who you were, and that’s why Daniel started watching the shelter work.”

“Partly,” Nora says. “Bane built the company. Nobody handed him that. But the introduction came through people Celeste helped long before any of us knew where it would lead.”

I turn Celeste’s photograph in my hands, tracing the worn corner. Nora’s explanation rearranges the beginning of a company I thought I understood completely.

Nora reaches across the table and turns the photograph toward me. “She’d be proud of you.”

“I wish she’d told me.”

“I understand.” Nora’s expression carries none of the sympathy people usually give widowers. “But then she would’ve been telling you stories that belonged to women who trusted her. She loved you enough to know you didn’t need every detail to understand who she was.”

Emma’s fingers close around my wrist beneath the table. I study Celeste’s photograph again.

For months, every missing piece has felt like another question I should’ve known to ask when she was alive. I slide my thumb away from the worn corner and set the photograph beside Nora’s folders, where all those missing details belong to the women who trusted her.

I slide the picture carefully away from the edge of the table before Nora begins gathering the folders.

“You should tell the girls about her,” she says. “Everything you can.”

“I do.”

“Tell them more.”

I pick up Celeste’s photograph before pushing my chair back. “I will.”

Emma reaches for the photograph while I stand, and Nora walks us back toward the front door after nearly four hours around her kitchen table.

Before we leave, she touches my arm. “Benny?”

I turn.

“The packages were for them, but I think part of me sent them for you too.”

I glance toward Emma, who waits beside the door with Celeste’s photograph against her chest.

Nora follows my gaze. “You kept her promise,” she says. “You deserved to know how far it reached.”

I shake her hand, then change my mind and pull her into a brief hug that surprises both of us.

When I step back, her eyes are wet. “Thank you.”

Nora smiles. “She’d tell you to stop thanking me.”

A laugh catches in my throat as I reach for Celeste’s photograph. “Yeah, she would.”