Chapter 51 The search

Chapter 51 The search
The Legacy Ball was six weeks away.

Nia had counted, not obsessively, not the way a person counts down to something they are dreading, but with the quiet awareness of someone who understands that six weeks is both a long time and no time at all depending on how much still needs to be done.

She came in early. She came in early every day now.

The cleaning woman on her floor had started greeting her the way you greet a neighbour whose schedule you have memorised. That particular morning she looked up from her cart and pointed a feather duster in Nia's direction.

"You again."

"Good morning." Nia pushed her office door open with her shoulder, bag in one hand, coffee in the other.

"I was here at six," the woman said. "You were already sitting down."

"I had things to get through."

"You always have things to get through." The woman shook her head slowly. "This company puts something in the air, I think. Makes people forget they have homes."

"I know where my home is."

"Then why are you never in it?"

Nia set her coffee down and turned on her laptop. "Because the ball is in six weeks and I have a personal timeline to finish before four."

The cleaning woman gave her a long look, the kind that required no words, and wheeled her cart to the next office.

Nia sat down and got to work.

She had been building the personal chronology for two weeks now. Not the financial documentation that belonged to Xavier's legal team and they were thorough.

Her contribution was different. It was the part no transaction record could manufacture. The three years she had spent living inside Anthony DeLuca's house, watching things she had not understood at the time, hearing things she had filed away without knowing she was filing them. 

Now, placed against dates and documents, they formed a pattern she could no longer call coincidence.

A phone call taken in the bathroom with the door locked.

A dinner that ended abruptly the moment his phone buzzed three times under the table.

The particular tension in his shoulders in the weeks before certain deals closed.

She wrote it all down. She checked it twice for accuracy. She made sure she was not letting bitterness colour the facts because coloured facts would not survive the kind of scrutiny this case was going to receive.

At half past ten, Gia appeared in her doorway.

"Updated financial thread," he said, placing a folder on her desk. "Three new links between the Rahman records and the DeLuca accounts."

Nia opened the folder without looking up. "When does Xavier need the chronology?"

"Before five."

"He will have it before four."

Gia did not leave immediately. She could feel him looking at the organised chaos of her desk, the colour-coded pages, the margin notes, the second notebook she had started when the first one ran out of space.

"You have been through all of this already?" he said.

"Twice."

"Twice?"

She looked up. "I needed to be sure I had not missed anything."

Gia was quiet in the way he was often quiet, not empty but considered. Then he said, "He was right about you."

"Who?"

"Mr Xavier."

She made herself sound unbothered. "What did he say?"

"That when it mattered, you would not fold."

She held his gaze for a moment and then looked back at the folder. Gia straightened and left without adding anything to it, which was the right instinct. Some things did not need a response. They needed time to settle.

She sat with it briefly and then went back to work.

That evening she stayed after the floor emptied out.

Not for the chronology, she had sent that before four as promised. She stayed because something else had been sitting underneath everything else for weeks and she had been putting off the moment of actually looking at it directly.

She opened a new document.

She typed the name. Hamma Rahman.

She stared at it.

Then she started writing down everything she actually knew about her mother. The verifiable ones. The knowledge that Hamma had been pregnant and unmarried and had been made to leave. 

The knowledge that every photograph of her had been removed from her grandmother's home with a thoroughness that did not happen by accident.

She sat with the document and its near-emptiness for a long time.

Then she picked up her phone and called Sophia.

"Are you still at the office?" Sophia said instead of hello.

"Yes."

"It is past seven."

"I know." Nia leaned back in her chair. "I need to ask you something."

"Ask."

"If you wanted to find someone who had been living quietly for a very long time. Someone who had made sure there was almost nothing to find. Where would you start?"

Sophia was quiet for a moment. "How quietly are we talking?"

"No photographs. No consistent records. Possibly a different name."

Another pause. "Nia." Sophia's voice had changed slightly. "Who are you looking for?"

Nia was quiet.

"Nia."

"I am not ready to say it out loud yet."

Sophia did not push. That was one of the things about Sophia, she knew when to press and when to wait and she almost always chose correctly. "Okay," she said finally. "But you know I am here when you are."

"I know."

"Come home. You can think about it better when you are not surrounded by whatever that building does to your brain."

Nia almost smiled. "I will be there in an hour."

She ended the call. She looked at the document on her screen. She did not have the resources to find someone who had been deliberately unfindable for this long. She needed someone with reach she did not have. 

Someone with access to records that did not show up in public directories. Someone whose team could follow a trail that had been carefully obscured across decades.

She thought about Xavier.

She thought about how to ask without saying why. Because saying why meant saying it out loud and she was not ready. She needed something solid to hold first. She would get far enough to know there was something real to find and then she would tell him everything.

She was going to find her.

She just needed to figure out how.