Grace pushed open the door to her tiny office and let out a tired breath.
Her desk was a mess of files and receipts. She dropped her bag and sank into the chair.
She opened her notebook and stared at the name she had written in the margin: Bernard.
"Bernard… who are you?" she whispered.
She pulled a stack of sticky notes from the drawer.
One by one she wrote the facts she had: oil spills, unpaid wages, men who vanished, threats whispered in factories.
She stuck the notes on the corkboard until the whole board was full.
The thought of the investigation should have been enough to occupy her mind. Instead, Donald's face kept coming back. His cold eyes.
The way his smile had cut her.
She closed her eyes and told herself to focus. This was not about him. This was about the people who had lost everything.
A thin lead caught her attention. It was small, a scribble in the factory worker's notebook.
It named a clinic and a date. It could be nothing. It could be something.
"I can ask the people around the drilling site. I'm sure someone would talk," She said as she packed her bags, about to leave the office for her home.
***********************
Across town, Donald sat alone in his father's study. The house smelled of old paper and whiskey.
He poured himself a glass, then set it down untouched.
He could not stop thinking about Grace. The girl in the cheap blazer. The girl who stood up to him when others bowed.
No amount of whiskey could quiet the storm in his heart.
"She'll break," He lifted his glass to his lips. "They always break." He whispered but he didn't sound convinced.
He turned towards the shelves lined up with ledgers. One of them was out of place. It caught his attention.
He reached for the ledger.
He flipped through the pages.
Numbers. Names. Approvals.
Wages listed as paid. Bank references he did not recognize. Payments routed to accounts with strange names.
The sums were small in one place, large in another. The pattern was wrong.
His eyes narrowed. "How?" he muttered. He picked more ledgers, flipped through their pages one by one.
He found notes in a margin. Someone had scratched out figures. Someone had moved money around.
"How?" he muttered. Someone had covered tracks.
His mind drifted to Grace. He remembered her words again, "It's not noise, it's life." For the first time, he wondered if it wasn't just noise after all.
There was a knock on the door. The head of servants stepped in.
"Your mother is back, she asked for you, sir."
He signalled her to leave.
He was about to leave when his eyes fell on one last information
BERNARD STONE — TRANSFER TO HALCYON TRUST — 1996.
Donald froze. The name Bernard Stone echoed in his mind, and this time, it felt personal.