Chapter 4 - The Audit of Caleb Harlan
By Tuesday morning, the world Caleb Harlan thought he owned had shrunk to the dimensions of a rented Hyundai Sonata parked outside a diner in downtown Hartford.
According to the reports Dean pulled from the county registry before lunch, Harlan & Sons had officially ceased to exist as an independent entity. The assets—including the Greenwich estate, the three commercial office buildings on Constitution Plaza, and the sixty-foot Hatteras yacht moored in Newport—had been transferred to a receivership controlled by Whitcomb-Hallowell Capital.
Caleb had tried to call my phone four times between seven and eight in the morning.
I had left the phone on the mahogany desk in my old bedroom—the one with the bay window overlooking the garden where my mother’s rosebushes still grew under their winter straw. I didn't answer. I didn't need to hear him explain that it was all a misunderstanding, or that Vanessa had tricked him, or that he had only used the training strap because he was under “unprecedented stress from the market.”
At ten o’clock, Everett walked into the library carrying a thick stack of printed emails and a porcelain mug of black coffee.
“His bank accounts were frozen at midnight,” Everett said, sitting down in the leather wingback chair opposite mine. “Every single personal and corporate account. The credit cards were declined when he tried to buy breakfast at the country club this morning.”
“Did he make a scene?”
“According to the club manager, he tried to wave his board membership card at the kid behind the counter and ended up walking out without his coffee when the manager threatened to call the county sheriff.” Everett set the coffee mug down. “He’s currently sitting in the parking lot of his former office building trying to figure out why his keycard won't open the glass doors.”
I looked out the window. A light snow was beginning to fall over the Brookline lawns, dusting the dark cedar branches with white.
“Do you think he knows yet?”
“Knows what?”
“That I was never just Madeline Ross.”
Everett snorted. “Caleb doesn't understand anything that isn't printed on a balance sheet or featured in a magazine article about self-made men. He spent six years believing you were a charity case he’d rescued from the suburbs because it made him feel like a patriarch. If he realized you could have bought his entire family lineage before breakfast on our grandfather’s seventy-fifth birthday, his brain would probably short-circuit.”
“I want to go to the office tomorrow,” I said.
Everett paused, his coffee mug halfway to his mouth. “Which office? The one in Boston, or the one we just took away from him in Hartford?”
“Boston. My old desk. Is it still there?”
May you like
Everett looked at me for a long moment, his grey eyes softening just a bit.
“Maddie, nobody’s touched your desk since you walked out in June six years ago. Silas tried to reassign it to an associate from the London office back in twenty-four, and I told him if he moved your reference books, I’d cut his bonus in half for the decade.”
