Chapter 4 Missing Years

Lex

Grant had the file on my desk before eight, thicker than I'd asked for and thinner than I actually needed, which told me my team still didn't fully understand what I was doing or why I was doing it this carefully for a contract this size.

"You wanted background on the dancer." He set it down and didn't sit, which meant he had something to say before he'd let himself leave. "There's something you should hear before you go in there."

"Go ahead."

"Everything checks out clean. No debts we could find, no record, no complaints filed against her or by her in fourteen months at that club, which is unusual on its own. But her history before that doesn't exist. Not scrubbed, not sealed. Just absent. Four years ago she shows up with a lease and a job application and nothing before it that we could trace in the time we had."

I'd already seen that page. I'd read it twice before Grant walked in, and I'd spent longer than I wanted to admit deciding what it meant instead of simply noting it and moving on the way I would have with any other line item.

"People start over," I said.

"People start over and leave a trail doing it. Divorce records, old addresses, a name change filed somewhere. This isn't a woman who quietly moved states. This is a careful woman." Grant finally sat, which meant this was the part he'd been building toward. "I'm not telling you not to do this. I'm telling you that if this gets scrutinized the way Elena's situation got scrutinized, a gap like that is exactly the kind of thing a reporter finds interesting."

"Then we make sure it doesn't get scrutinized."

"That's not really an answer."

He wasn't wrong, and he wasn't the first person on my team who'd have the nerve to say so to my face, which was half of why I kept him. He hadn't watched her check the exits before she checked the tip jar, though. I had. It was the same instinct I ran every room with myself, and something about recognizing it in someone else made the missing four years feel less like a liability and more like the only part of her file I actually trusted.

"I'm not asking you to like the gap," I told Grant. "I'm asking you to make sure nothing in that gap follows her into a room with Whitfield before the merger closes. Whatever she's running from is hers. What I need from her is simple. She has to read as real, because Whitfield's people will be looking for anything staged, and after Elena, staged is the one thing I can't afford again."

"And if the gap is worse than we think?"

"Then I'll deal with it when it's worth dealing with." I closed the file. "Not before."

He didn't push further, because he knew when I'd finished a conversation, and he left me with twenty minutes before she was due, which I spent doing nothing useful at all, just standing at the window running the same four years over in my head like a problem I hadn't been asked to solve and couldn't stop working on anyway.

I thought about pulling the file back open and reading it a third time, and decided against it. There was nothing new to find in it. Whatever wasn't there had been removed carefully enough that a firm I paid a great deal of money couldn't put it back together in twelve hours, and that alone told me more than another read-through would. Careless people left gaps by accident. This gap had been built.

She arrived at three minutes to ten, which I noted, because nervous people either came early to steady themselves or late to delay the moment, and she'd done neither. Grant walked her in himself. She'd traded the club for something plainer, dark jeans, a coat that wasn't trying to impress anyone in this building, and if she was intimidated by the office she didn't let it reach her face.

"Ms. Cole." I stood, because whatever this arrangement was going to be, I wasn't going to start it sitting behind a desk like she was applying for a job I'd already decided to give her. "Thank you for coming in."

"Your lawyer made it clear I didn't have much of a choice about the timing."

"You had a choice about all of it. You're the one who called him back." I gestured to the chair across from mine, and she sat the way she'd stood in the club the night before, spine straight, chin level, giving away exactly as much as she wanted to and not a fraction more. "I'll let him walk you through the language again if you want it, but I'm guessing you've already read it twice."

"Three times."

"Then you know what you're agreeing to."

"I know what's written down." She held my eyes when she said it, steady in a way most people weren't with me anymore, not since the company had a name people recognized on sight. "I don't know why you're the one who wrote it."

I didn't answer that. Not because I didn't have an answer, but because the real one wasn't for a signing room, and the answer I could give her, the one about Whitfield and optics and a merger that needed to look nothing like Elena's, was true without being anywhere close to the whole truth. I slid the pen across the desk instead and watched her pick it up without a single moment of hesitation.

She signed her name.

Sasha Cole.

Four years ago, that signature hadn't existed anywhere I could find.