The Deposit Audit Showed What Bryce Had Sold Before Asking

Two weeks after the hearing, an accountant named Vera Chen came to the loft.

"I'm reviewing the company's records by agreement," she said. "I need to match the payments it claims against your receipts."

She set her bag on the floor instead of my cutting table. I appreciated that before she said another word.

I gave her copies of the bills for the roof, the windows, the electrical work, and the insurance.

"Thirty years?" she asked.

"The early ones are faded. I copied them before they vanished."

Inez brought coffee and moved her painting of a winter loon away from the papers.

Vera checked dates. She asked about a $6,200 roof payment and a $940 motor repair. She did not ask whether Bryce was a bad man. That wasn't her column to fill.

"Did Fenwick Marine Services reimburse any of these?"

"No. Arthur once paid for a shared gutter. That's in the separate envelope."

I had marked it SHARED, not MINE. I wanted my work back, not someone else's money.

Vera nodded and kept adding.

When her report arrived, June asked us to read it at her office. The company records were being shared for the case. They were not something to pin on a dock gate.

The report found no company payment toward my $48,000 renewal. It also found no record of a signed surrender.

It did find the agreement Bryce had made with Dana.

He had promised to secure the trust's approval for redevelopment and deliver the loft empty. If he could not, his company had to return the deposit. He had personally guaranteed that return.

"He signed that guarantee?" Inez asked.

June pointed to the bottom of the page.

There was his big, sloping signature. Even his name took more space than it needed.

Of the $125,000, Bryce had paid himself $18,000 as a project fee. Another $22,000 had gone to a design firm for drawings and a site plan.

The firm had done the work it was hired to do. Its invoice warned that ownership and tenant rights had to be checked before any work began at the property.

One drawing showed my cutting table replaced by a bar. Where Inez kept her paints, someone had drawn a row of stools facing the water. The drawing itself was clean and careful. That made it worse somehow. My whole working life had been treated as furniture that could be carried out.

Bryce had skipped that check.

"Can the drawings be returned?" I asked.

"They were delivered," June said. "The firm earned its fee. His mistake doesn't make their work free."

I could understand that. Cloth cut to the wrong man's order was still cut cloth.

The remaining $85,000 had reached the lawyers' escrow account. Dana had filed a separate refund suit for the shortage and her costs.

"He's forty thousand short before anyone counts legal bills," Inez said.

"Yes."

For years Bryce had told me I lacked the nerve for business. I had bought used machines, patched my own roof, and turned away jobs I could not finish on time.

He had called that small thinking.

Now a row of figures showed the cost of his large thinking.

There was also an email chain. After Mara's letter reached him Friday, Dana had asked Bryce to explain it.

He had answered, Ernesto will tire of fighting. He always lets Inez smooth things over.

Inez read that line without moving.

Then she asked June for a blank sheet.

She wrote slowly. Her letters were small and clear, the way she labeled the bones in a fish drawing.

Bryce, I have not agreed to speak for you. Do not tell anyone that Ernesto will leave, that I support your agreement, or that we owe you access. Send future requests about the loft through June.

She signed it and asked June to send it to Paul.

"Would you like a copy at home?" June asked.

"Yes. I want to remember that I said it."

That evening, a trust member named Owen stopped by the loft. He had been at my lunch and had laughed once when Bryce called my work a hobby.

"I should have spoken," he said.

I waited.

"I'm sorry. The board has suspended Bryce from the fundraising committee while we review his conduct. He used its letterhead in his pitch."

"He didn't use it with your permission?"

"No."

I thanked him for coming. I did not tell him everything was fine.

After he left, Inez put her copy of the letter beside her drawing board. She weighed it down with a smooth stone from Brenton Point.

At seven, the loft telephone rang.

The caller introduced herself as a building inspector. A complaint had described my shop as an unsafe industrial space with a blocked exit. She needed to arrange an inspection.