PART 14:

Not the Delaware entity, the Cayman account. If he doesn’t know it exists, the drive told him where to look. If he already knows it exists, his team is closer than I thought. A pause. The junior partner’s name is Owen Lacier. He’s been billing the trust account for 6 years and he’s 31 years old and he has a daughter and I think he’s been doing the math on what those two facts mean together for a while now.

Ava absorbed this. You’ve been building this, she said. Not just protecting me, building the whole thing. A place for all of it to land. He didn’t answer. How long? She said, a beat. since April, he said. Seven months ago when I found out about the account with your name on it. She stood on the sidewalk in the November cold and felt the scale of it.

Not just the emotional weight, which was enormous, but the sheer structural weight of 7 months of a man moving pieces she couldn’t see toward a conclusion she hadn’t known was coming. She didn’t know how to feel about it. She didn’t have time to figure it out right now. I’m going back in, she said. I’m going to give Delaney the Cayman account in Owen Lacader’s name. Yes.

And when this is done, when this is done, he said, we’ll have a different conversation than the one we’ve been having. That’s not a plan, Lucian. No, he said, it’s a promise. She ended the call and turned back to Patricia. I need to go back in, she said. Patricia looked at her. The Cayman account, Ava said, I have another name. They went back in.

The second meeting was shorter and sharper. Delane’s expression when she mentioned the Cayman structure shifted in a way that confirmed what Lucian had suspected. They didn’t know it yet or had it only partially, and the specific account designation she provided clicked something into place.

When she said Owen Lacader’s name, Solless wrote it down without looking up with the speed of someone writing down something they’d been waiting for. They were out by 1:30. The cold had deepened. The wind off the Hudson was finding its way up the cross streets. And Ava stood outside the federal building in borrowed clothes and felt the specific quality of having done a thing that couldn’t be undone.

The drive was in federal hands. The names were in federal hands. Delaney had her cell number and Patricia’s number and had said in the careful language of a man who couldn’t promise anything specifically that the material witness designation was robust and the cooperation had been noted. Her father’s lawyers would know within hours.

She thought about the article from this morning. The erratic, the troubled daughter, the history of instability, the anonymous family sources who were almost certainly her mother, her father, possibly Seline, possibly Seline’s new husband’s people, all of them describing a woman they’d constructed from the parts of her that were most useful to their story. Her phone rang.

Not a text, a call. She looked at the screen, her mother. She stood there in the cold with the phone buzzing in her hand and thought about every version of this call she’d ever received. The calls that started with a concern and became an accusation. The calls that started with, “Love you, sweetheart,” and ended with, “But you really need to think about how you’re affecting this family.

” The calls she’d driven home from or walked home from or sat in bathroom stalls to decompress from, pressing her back against the cold tile until she remembered how to breathe. She picked up Ava, her mother’s voice. Vivien Moretti at 62, a woman who had never in Ava’s memory shown a visible crack controlled in the way of someone for whom control was the highest form of self-expression.

I need you to come home. No, Ava said. A pause. The word apparently required absorption. Your father is I know what dad is doing. Ava said, “I know what both of you have been doing. I spoke to federal investigators this morning, and I gave them everything Lucian’s people gathered on the trust accounts, and I gave them two additional leads that I’m told will be sufficient to build an independent case.” She paused.

“So, whatever you are going to say, I want you to know that before you say it.” The silence on her mother’s end was unlike any silence she’d heard from Viven Moretti before. Not the controlled silence of someone managing information. Something different. Something that had edges. “You don’t know what you’ve done,” her mother said. “I think I do.

” “You’ve destroyed your family.” “My family,” Ava said, “destroyed itself. I was just the place they were going to put the damage when it arrived.” Her voice stayed level. She hadn’t planned for it to be level. She’d have expected from herself something more ragged. I’m done being where you put things, Mom. Ava, don’t call me again today, she said.

Have your lawyers call Patricia Cho. She ended the call. Her hands were shaking. She looked at them, her calloused baker’s hands steady under the weight of a hundred finished cakes, trembling slightly now in the cold air of Lower Broadway. And she thought that was probably correct, that the shaking was the correct response to a morning that had started with her father’s manipulative text and ended with her mother’s voice telling her she’d destroyed her family, and that somewhere between those two things, she had handed a federal agent a drive full of evidence

and given them the name of a man named Owen Lacader, who had a daughter and had been doing the math. Patricia appeared beside her. “How are you?” Patricia said. “Functional,” Ava said. That’s enough for today. Patricia looked at her. Go somewhere safe. Don’t make any public statements. Don’t post anything. Don’t respond to the article.

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