Chapter 170 No Explanation Left to Find

Chapter 170 No Explanation Left to Find
Dominic's POV

I glanced at the screen. Carter. I set my fork down and looked at Sebastian. "Sorry, buddy. I need to take this. Give me two minutes." He nodded, already reaching for his juice, and I pushed back my chair and moved to the far end of the room.

"Boss." Carter's voice had the careful, clipped quality of someone delivering information he didn't want to be responsible for. "I'm sorry to call at this hour. But the controller flagged something after close of business and I thought you should know tonight."

"Go ahead."

"Your mother came into the financial office at approximately four this afternoon. She requested a wire authorization for one hundred million dollars. She told them it was a joint investment with an overseas philanthropic partner — a pre-approved international charitable initiative. She said you'd been informed."

I looked at the wall. "I hadn't been informed."

"No. That's what the controller concluded when he pulled the authorization chain and found nothing on file. The transfer went through at five-fifteen."

"Thank you, Carter," I said. "I'll be in touch."

I stood very still with the phone in my hand. One hundred million dollars. Wired at five-fifteen, directly after she'd left the estate. She had walked into my company and executed a nine-figure transfer using my name, for a project I had never heard of.

She had used my name. And then the other things began to surface — the ones I'd been keeping at careful distance since the night I'd stood outside her door and heard what I'd heard. The things I'd filed away under I must have misunderstood and there's an explanation I'm not seeing yet.

The transfer has cleared. Clean up the loose ends. Ten years and she couldn't keep her mouth shut. Miguel and the child. That girl is also a thread.

Cold sweat gathered between my shoulder blades. Margot Marlowe had died in prison. One hundred million dollars. An overseas partner. A woman who had cut her own SIM cards and left without telling anyone where she was going.

I walked back to the table. Sebastian was pushing the last of his pasta around his plate with the distracted patience of a boy waiting for an adult to finish adult things. I crouched beside his chair.

"Hey. I'm sorry — something's come up and I have to go out for a little while. Martha's going to stay with you tonight, okay?"

He looked at me with those careful eyes, and for a moment he said nothing. Then, quietly, more to the plate than to me: "You're always going somewhere." It wasn't a complaint exactly — it was the observation of a child who had learned to keep his complaints small, who had decided that stating a fact was safer than asking a question that might not get answered. I pressed a kiss to the top of his head and straightened up without letting myself linger on it.

I picked up my phone and called my mother's number. It rang five times, six, seven. Voicemail. I called again. Then again. By the third unanswered call I was standing in the hallway, the cold sweat running down my back in earnest, and the silence on the other end of the line was no longer the silence of a woman who was busy or sleeping. It was the considered, deliberate silence of someone who had decided, in advance, not to be reached.

I walked to my mother's door and pushed it open without knocking.

---

The wardrobe stood half-open. Not emptied — not stripped bare in the way of someone who'd packed with sufficient time — but visibly reduced, gaps where items had been taken quickly, in handfuls, without stopping to straighten what remained.

The nightstand drawers had been pulled and pushed back with insufficient care, a silk scarf caught in the frame of one that wouldn't quite close. On the surface of the nightstand were the remains of several SIM cards — not dropped, not carelessly discarded, but cut, the pieces lying in a small deliberate scatter, the methodical remnants of someone who understood that a phone card held a record and had decided the record should not exist.

I crouched beside the wastebasket. Documents torn into strips — not destroyed, because there hadn't been time, but reduced enough to require reconstruction. At the bottom, a corner of paper with scorched edges, the smell of a lighter on it, the smell of something that had been burning and then stopped.

My mother had left in a hurry. She had taken money she was not authorized to take. She had cut her SIM cards. She had burned what she could and shredded what she couldn't. I straightened up and let the two possible explanations arrange themselves in front of me.

The first: the money was being sent somewhere. To someone. A hundred million dollars wired overseas to cover the cost of what she'd asked to be done — Miguel, and whoever else qualified as a thread she needed cut. Payment. Cleanup. The efficient disbursement of a woman who had always believed that sufficient resources solved most problems.

The second: she was running. The money was hers now, moved before anyone could freeze it, and she was somewhere in the air above the Atlantic with a new phone and no intention of coming back.

Both explanations led to the same place. Both meant that Margot Marlowe had not died by accident. Both meant that my mother had done things — was doing things, was perhaps in the process of completing things — that no amount of charitable initiatives was going to cover.

Both meant that whatever I had been telling myself about misunderstandings and stress and explanations I hadn't found yet was nothing more than a man refusing to count up numbers he already knew the sum of.

I pulled out my phone and sent Martha a single text: Staying with Sebastian tonight. I'm leaving now. Don't wait up. She replied in under a minute — Already with him. Go — and that was enough. I didn't go back to the kitchen. There was nothing left to say that hadn't already been arranged.

The front door. The cold. The car.

Even if she was gone — even if she was already forty thousand feet over the ocean with a clean phone and a new name — her private residence was the one place she hadn't had time to sanitize. Whatever she'd left behind at the estate was the wreckage of speed, of someone packing in under an hour. Her house on the other side of the city might hold the answers she hadn't managed to burn. At minimum, it would tell me how long she'd been planning this, and how long I'd been the last to know.

I drove with my foot pressed hard against the accelerator, and the feeling in my hands on the wheel was not grief this time and it was not regret. It was something that had no patience left in it, something that had run out of the capacity to wait and see and tell itself there was an explanation it hadn't found yet.

I drove, and I didn't look at the rearview mirror, and the city came up to meet me in the dark.