The Bank Records Linked Our Missing Royalties To Gideon

I asked the driver to wait while I called my lawyer.

"I'm not taking sides," he said.

"You don't have to. The goods aren't released."

Gideon climbed out of the van.

He wore the same spotless boots. Up close, I saw sawdust along one sole, as if he had stepped in it on purpose.

"Mai arranged this before the hearing," he said. "We're just moving samples for safekeeping."

"Then you won't mind waiting."

Anika asked me to send a photo of the pickup sheet and read the temporary order to Gideon. She also called his office. The driver marked the pickup refused and left with an empty truck.

Gideon stayed.

"You know what those old boards are worth without Mai?"

"No. I haven't had them valued yet."

He waited for me to get angry. I wrote the time on my inventory instead.

"She built your market," he said.

"She did work. That doesn't explain my signature."

"Nobody stole a pencil drawing, Seng."

"Then why did you send a truck?"

He left without answering.

Two weeks passed before the bank records came through the legal requests Anika had made. They were slow weeks. I finished a set of diner booths. Mai worked from home. We spoke through counsel about bills and deadlines.

At night I stayed with my cousin Tou, paid him $175 a week, and slept in a room above his garage. My cousin asked once whether I wanted company.

"Just breakfast," I said.

He left a bowl and a spoon on the table each morning.

When Felix called, I went straight to his office.

He had cleared a space the width of my cutting ruler. Everything else on his desk remained a mess.

"I have the bank's records, not screenshots from Mai," he said.

The MX account had received all $293,880 that was missing from the studio.

Mai alone could sign on it.

Felix had also matched the $18,600 sent to Small Repeat against our regular bank records. That money had paid real studio costs. He marked those payments in green and the diverted payments in red. He made no claim that every bad month or unpaid bill had been caused by Mai. The shop had lost one large customer that winter. Cloth prices had risen. Those troubles were real.

"The missing money is enough," he said. "We don't need to load anything else onto it."

There were no fabric bills. No printer fees. No customer refunds.

There were four transfers to Vale Room LLC, each for $21,000.

"Eighty-four thousand," I said.

Felix nodded.

"The man selling us the sale," I said.

"The man who would buy the shop."

The transfer notes called the payments consulting advances. Anika had requested the contracts and invoices behind them.

"Maybe he did eighty-four thousand dollars of work," I said.

Felix looked across his glasses.

"Then eighty-four thousand dollars of work should leave a trail."

The account balance was $169,880. Another $40,000 had gone into a cashier's check the day before our first hearing.

The four transfers, the check, and the balance added up to $293,880 exactly.

I studied the page. At the cutting table, a mismatched blue seed could tell me the whole strip was off. Here, every dollar had found its place. That made the picture worse, not better.

"Her disclosure listed the account at zero," I said.

"It listed a business clearing account with no retained earnings. Those aren't the same words as a zero balance. Either way, these funds weren't disclosed."

He circled the cashier's check number.

"We need to know where this is."

Anika moved that afternoon to enforce the disclosure order. She sent notice to Mai's lawyer and requested the check's location. She also made a separate demand on Vale Room for records and repayment, followed by a civil filing when Gideon's lawyer refused.

"A claim isn't a judgment," she reminded me. "We'll prove what we can prove."

That evening, Mai came to the loading door carrying a grocery bag.

"I brought your good bowls."

They were wrapped in a towel from our kitchen. I set them on a shelf.

"Thank you."

She looked past me at the cutting table.

"Can we stop paying people to hate each other?"

"Where's the forty-thousand-dollar check?"

She shut her eyes.

"That was my safety money."

"You had a hidden account. I had a pillowcase full of paper."

"You always make me sound cruel."

"I asked where the check was."

She left the bowls and took the towel.

The next morning, Anika received Gideon's first set of documents. Felix called while I was chalking a cushion panel.

"Their consulting agreement has an exhibit," he said. "It says fifty thousand of your royalties was reserved to pay the balance on your own studio."