Chapter 11
A leaf detached itself from a dying maple branch overhead and drifted down to land squarely on the toe of Eleanor's mud-splattered shoe. She stared at it for a long moment, the quiet indignity of what Marcus had done settling over her like a heavy, suffocating blanket. "A check," she repeated, the word tasting sour. "He bought you off with company funds and threatened you with vagrancy laws." Arthur shrugged, his broad shoulders shifting beneath the olive-green canvas. "Money didn't mean much to me by then, Ellie. I'd spent half my life eating cold rations in the jungle and the other half staring at white hospital walls. But I kept the photo. It was the only thing the guards didn't burn when they took my pack at the prison camp—I kept it sewn inside the lining of this old jacket." He reached down and smoothed a rough thumb over the scorched edge of the paper, his expression softening into something distant and melancholic. "I didn't come today to shake him down for a pension or demand a seat on the board. My fight ended a long time ago. I just saw his face on a billboard outside the convention center yesterday—the big executive of the year smiling down from thirty feet in the air—and something in me snapped. I figured it was time someone reminded him that not everything stays buried under a rug." Eleanor reached out, her manicured fingers brushing against the rough, dirty fabric of his sleeve, feeling the solid bone and muscle beneath. It was a terrifyingly real connection to a ghost she had mourned for half her life. "He's not getting away with it," she said, her voice dropping into a register of cold, absolute determination that had made her father a titan in the shipping industry. "The board meets on Monday morning to approve the annual audit. Marcus thinks he's untouchable because he holds the voting proxies, but my father never relinquished the primary trust shares. They were always registered in my name—and in yours, if you were ever found."
