Chapter 15 - THE GIFT I FORGOT
Memories are strange.
Some disappear because they are unimportant.
Others disappear because a child does not understand what she is seeing.
I spent hours thinking about the final week of my mother’s life.
Then I remembered the music box.
It had been shaped like a small wooden house.
Mom gave it to me three days before the accident.
“Keep this forever,” she had said.
I thought she meant because it was beautiful.
After she died, Dad packed many of her belongings into storage.
The music box went with them.
“Where is it?”
Dad understood immediately.
“Vale family archive.”
We flew back to New York under heavy security.
The archive occupied a private underground facility beneath one of Vale Dominion’s oldest buildings.
Thousands of boxes held three generations of family records.
A curator found the music box within twenty minutes.
My hands trembled when I opened it.
A tiny ballerina began turning.
The same melody I had forgotten for two decades filled the room.
Nothing looked unusual.
Dad examined the base.
“May I?”
I nodded.
He removed four tiny screws.
Under the mechanical plate was a narrow cavity.
Inside sat a micro-storage chip.
My mother had hidden the Black Meridian ledger inside my childhood music box.
For twenty-two years, Victor had searched banks, offices, servers, warehouses, and private vaults.
The evidence had been sitting inside a cardboard box labeled CHILDHOOD ITEMS.
Dad’s analysts decrypted it.
The ledger contained names.
Hundreds of them.
Corporate executives.
Judges.
Customs officials.
Bankers.
Foreign intermediaries.
And one name that made everyone stop.
Victor Sloane.
Beside it was a biometric trust account worth more than two billion dollars.
“Can we freeze it?” I asked.
“Not without alerting him,” Dad said.
“Then alert him.”
Dad looked at me.
I continued.
“He’s running because he believes we’re still chasing him.”
“So?”
“Stop chasing.”
I pointed toward Victor’s account.
“Take away the reason he runs.”
One analyst understood.
“Freeze the money.”
“Exactly.”
Victor had spent his life protecting Black Meridian.
Protecting wealth.
If the final reserve disappeared, he would not flee farther.
He would come back.
Dad studied me.
“You want to use the account as bait.”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
I thought about my mother.
About Nathan.
About Celeste.
About twenty-two years of lies.
“For me.”
Dad’s expression hardened.
“No.”
“I’m the reason he recruited Nathan.”
“No.”
“I’m the person he has watched for ten years.”
“No.”
“And if he thinks I possess the original ledger, he’ll come directly to me.”
Dad slammed his palm onto the table.
“I already lost your mother because of Victor Sloane.”
The room went silent.
I looked at him.
“And I nearly lost myself because everyone kept protecting me with secrets.”
His face changed.
“I’m not asking you to leave me unprotected.”
I pushed the music box toward him.
“I’m asking you to trust me.”
For a long time, my father said nothing.
Then he nodded once.
“Where?”
I already knew.
May you like
“Blackthorn Manor.”
The place where Nathan tried to erase me would become the place where Black Meridian ended.
