Chapter 5 - THE TRANSFERS
Claire asked the nurse to close the door.
Then she told me why she'd started watching my mother.
It had nothing to do with pills.
Three months earlier, Claire had helped me reconcile expense reports for Carter Residential Group, the construction company my father founded.
Claire was a CPA before Ethan was born. She had stepped away from her firm during pregnancy, but numbers still spoke to her faster than they ever had to me.
She noticed repeated consulting payments.
$18,500.
$22,000.
$16,750.
Always to the same vendor.
M.C. Advisory LLC.
“I asked you about it,” Claire said.
I remembered.
I had told her Mom handled legacy vendors.
That answer now embarrassed me.
Claire checked the state business registry.
M.C. Advisory had been formed eighteen months earlier.
Its mailing address belonged to a private mailbox.
But its registered agent shared an office suite with my mother's personal accountant.
Claire totaled the payments.
$438,250.
I stopped breathing for a second.
“You think Mom took company money?”
“I think she knew I found something.”
Claire had copied the payment reports and bank reconciliation summaries onto an encrypted flash drive.
She had also printed three pages.
Those were the papers she held in the nursery recording.
“Where's the drive?”
Her expression changed.
“I hid it.”
“Where?”
She looked toward Ethan's sleeping face.
“Inside the nursery.”
The police still had the house secured.
I called the detective and explained.
He agreed to meet me there.
Lauren arrived before I left the hospital.
She looked wrecked.
“I didn't know,” she said.
Claire didn't respond.
Lauren moved closer.
“I thought Mom was scared for Ethan.”
“You sent her my schedule,” I said.
“I thought she was checking on Claire.”
“You helped her plan around me.”
Lauren's face crumpled.
The damage between us was immediate and real.
At the house, Detective Mark Ellis walked me through the kitchen.
The burned pot had been removed.
The broken porcelain remained photographed and bagged.
Margaret's dinner plate sat exactly where she'd left it.
Half-eaten chicken.
Fork resting neatly beside it.
I hated that plate.
Claire had hidden the drive behind the removable battery panel of Ethan's white-noise machine.
The panel was open.
The drive was gone.
Ellis looked at me.
“Who knew she was reviewing those accounts?”
“Me.”
“Anyone else?”
I thought of the evening Claire mentioned the strange vendor while Margaret was sitting ten feet away in our living room.
My mother knew.
But someone else knew too.
My company's controller, Greg Nolan.
I had emailed him asking what M.C. Advisory did.
His answer had been one sentence.
Old executive consulting. Approved by Margaret Carter.
At the time, I accepted it.
Now I opened my work email.
Greg's message was gone.
Not archived.
Deleted.
May you like
And I hadn't deleted it.
📖 The missing flash drive made Margaret look guilty, but my own work account had been altered by someone with company access—and that person could destroy far more than one file. 👇
