Part 5

Several of them carried dates from the previous six weeks.

The same period during which Vanessa had supposedly been struggling with her apartment lease.

She had told us her landlord was selling the property.

Ethan had suggested she stay in the guest house behind his family’s estate until she found somewhere else.

I had agreed because I thought helping a friend was the right thing to do.

Now I wondered whether the timing had been deliberate.

I opened a file containing the company’s recent account movements.

The numbers were difficult to process.

Money had been transferred between accounts under several different descriptions.

Some payments had been categorized as consulting fees.

Others appeared as repayments of old obligations.

I recognized the dates.

Then I noticed a name.

Julian Vance.

My fingers stopped moving.

Julian had been Ethan’s former business partner.

He had helped establish the company two years earlier.

I had met him several times during the early days of Hawthorne & Cole Consulting.

He had been quiet, careful, and noticeably less interested in appearances than Ethan.

Then, almost overnight, he had disappeared from Boston.

Ethan told me that Julian had decided to leave the business.

He said the partnership had become difficult and that Julian had signed away his interest before moving on.

I remembered asking whether everything had been settled fairly.

Ethan had answered with a single sentence.

“Julian got exactly what he wanted.”

I opened the document containing Julian’s withdrawal agreement.

Something about the signature bothered me.

I zoomed in.

Then I opened an older partnership agreement that contained Julian’s original signature.

I placed the two documents side by side.

The differences were small.

The shape of the first letter.

The pressure at the end of the final stroke.

The way the signature curved upward.

I remembered watching Julian sign the original agreement at Ethan’s office.

He had joked that his handwriting looked like a doctor’s prescription.

The signature on the withdrawal document looked too familiar.

It appeared to have been copied.

I leaned closer to the screen.

Then I opened the accompanying transaction records.

The wire transfers began during the exact week Julian vanished.

The amounts were divided across several accounts.

A note in the supporting records referenced a network access log.

I clicked it.

The IP address was listed beside the authorization record.

I recognized the location attached to the network.

It belonged to the private internet connection at the seaside cabin where Ethan and Vanessa spent nearly every childhood-memory weekend.

I had heard about that cabin countless times.

Vanessa called it their second home.

Ethan had shown me photographs of the two of them there as children.

They still visited it whenever they wanted to escape the city.

I sat back.

Two years earlier, Julian had supposedly signed away his company stake and disappeared.

The wire transfers had followed.

The signature appeared to be forged.

And the transaction authorization came from the network associated with Ethan and Vanessa’s favorite private retreat.

I looked again at the holding company documents.

The dates were even more disturbing.

Six weeks ago, Ethan had begun moving assets into the secondary structure.

The registry showed that the latest filing had been completed that morning.

At 6:42 a.m.

While I was standing outside my apartment building waiting for my bridal limousine, the final registration had been processed.

I stared at the timestamp.

Then I looked toward the wedding gown hanging over the chair in the other room.

The realization came slowly.

The wedding was not simply a celebration that Vanessa had managed to hijack.

It was also a distraction.

A public spectacle designed to keep me busy, emotional, and occupied while Ethan and Vanessa completed the restructuring.

They wanted me at the hotel.