Chapter 7 - The Letter My Mother Never Sent
I did not turn around.
Daniel wanted a reaction.
I gave him none.
“My mother never met you,” I said into the phone.
His reflection smiled.
“That’s what you were told.”
“By whom?”
“Ask Calder.”
The call ended.
Daniel and Voss walked away together.
Tessa looked at me.
“You know him?”
“That’s Gregory’s father.”
Her face lost color.
“The passenger in 8142?”
“Yes.”
I left the lounge before Voss could return.
My first instinct was to call Gregory.
I ignored it.
Gregory would lie.
Daniel would manipulate.
I needed something neither man controlled.
My mother’s records.
The files on my missing flash drive were duplicates.
The originals were stored in Calder’s secure shareholder archive and my Florida bank vault.
I couldn’t access the corporate system anymore.
But years earlier, my mother had insisted that significant shareholder correspondence also be copied to a private family cloud account.
Gregory did not know that account existed.
I logged in.
Hundreds of scanned letters appeared.
Most were ordinary.
Dividend notices.
Board summaries.
Voting correspondence.
Then I searched HARTMAN.
Three results.
All dated seven years earlier.
One year before my mother died.
The first was a letter from Hartman Holdings offering to buy her twelve-percent stake.
She had declined.
The second doubled the offer.
She declined again.
The third was different.
No formal offer.
Just a handwritten note scanned into the file.
MARGARET—
YOU ARE BLOCKING SOMETHING MUCH LARGER THAN A SALE.
TAKE THE MONEY.
DANIEL HARTMAN.
My mother’s name had been Margaret Reed.
I stared at Daniel’s signature.
Six years later, his son met me at a corporate fundraising dinner.
Charming.
Attentive.
Interested in everything except my money.
Or so I had believed.
I opened the scanned envelope.
My mother had written something across the back.
IF DANIEL EVER APPROACHES ASHLYNN, CALL COUNSEL IMMEDIATELY.
My throat tightened.
She had known.
Not about Gregory specifically.
About Daniel.
My mother had anticipated that he might eventually come through me.
I called Dana again.
Still off.
Then I called the secure voicemail account Dana and I had used for sensitive internal work.
It required a six-digit PIN.
There was one new recording.
Time stamped thirty-six minutes earlier.
I pressed play.
Static.
Then Dana’s voice.
“Ash, if you get this, do not trust any message from my regular phone.”
I sat up.
“I didn’t sign anything. I didn’t submit anything.”
Her breathing sounded uneven.
Someone spoke in the background.
Too faint to understand.
Dana continued quickly.
“Gregory’s background check was altered after I completed it. I found the original this morning.”
A door slammed.
Dana whispered, “He wasn’t clean.”
The recording crackled.
“He was connected to Hartman Holdings through three shell companies, and there was another woman before you—”
The message ended.
I replayed the final sentence.
Another woman.
Not wife.
Not fiancée.
Just another woman.
I called the cyber analyst back.
This time he sounded nervous.
“Ms. Hartman, I was about to contact you.”
“What happened?”
“Someone attempted to delete Ms. Brooks’s archived investigation files.”
“Were they successful?”
“Partially.”
“Can you recover them?”
“We’re preserving what remains.”
“Was there a file on Gregory Hartman?”
Silence.
“Yes.”
“Open it.”
“I can’t.”
“Tell me whether it existed.”
“It did.”
“Anything else?”
He hesitated.
“There’s a title attached to the deleted file.”
“What title?”
He read it slowly.
HARTMAN / SUBJECT TWO / FATAL INCIDENT REVIEW.
My skin went cold.
“Subject two?”
“That’s what it says.”
“If Gregory was subject two, who was subject one?”
Keyboard sounds.
Then he stopped.
“The reference ID points to a deceased Calder shareholder.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“Name?”
He answered.
“Margaret Reed.”
May you like
My mother.
📖 Discover why my mother had been named in a secret Hartman fatal-incident file—and what Gregory admitted when I confronted him about her in CHAPTER 8. 👇
