Page 6 of You, Only You

The coffee maker finished its cycle. Neither of us moved. The room felt smaller than its dimensions. She was studying me the same way I studied targets, looking for weaknesses, for tells, for the gap between performance and truth.

No one looked at me like that. No one dared.

"I don't trust you," I said.

The words came out harder than I intended, a blade unsheathed. Her expression flickered at the sudden shift from professional fencing to open confrontation, but she didn't step back. Didn't flinch.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your father." I took a step closer, closing the distance between us, watching her face for any crack in the composure. "A lifetime of trust shattered because one man decided his needs mattered more than everyone else's."

A flash of pain crossed her features, raw and real, before she locked it down. I'd put that there. Filed the observation. Kept going.

"And you think that's relevant to my work here?" Her voice was steady, but I heard the effort it cost her.

"I think it's relevant to who you are." Another step. Close enough now to see the slight dilation of her pupils, the rapid pulse at her throat. "You grew up in wreckage, Ms. Ashford. You built your whole career on the ruins of your father's crimes. And now you're here, auditing me, and I'm supposed to believe it's just professional diligence?"

"What else would it be?"

"A chance to prove something. To yourself. About yourself. Using me as the proving ground."

She was quiet for a long moment. Then poured sugar into her coffee, the spoon clinking against the ceramic with maddening calm.

"You've thought about this," she said finally. "About me. About my motivations."

"I think about everyone's motivations."

"No." She shook her head slowly, something shifting in her expression. "You've thought aboutme. Specifically. That's... a lot of homework for someone who claims these complaints are baseless."

Miscalculation. Again. Instead of destabilizing her, I'd revealed something about myself, the attention I'd paid, the hours I'd spent turning her over in my mind. She saw it. Of course she saw it. She was trained to see exactly this kind of tell.

"I expect you to judge me by my work," she continued, her voice dropping to something almost intimate in its quietness. "Not by my father's sins. Not by your assumptions about my psychology. I'm here to follow the evidence, wherever it leads. If it leads nowhere, I'll say so. If it leads to something ugly..." She held my gaze. "I'll say that too."

"And I'm supposed to just trust that? Trust you?"

"I don't need you to trust me." She picked up her coffee mug, cradling it in both hands. "But I'll tell you what's interesting, Mr. Steele. You want me to justify myself, to prove my objectivity, to earn your confidence. Can you say the same about yourself?"

"What do you mean?"

"You have a reputation." She tilted her head, studying me. "Ruthless. Cold. A destroyer of careers. The legal community whispers about you like you're a cautionary tale. And yet here you are, running a successful firm, taking on cases, buildingsomething. Either the reputation is wrong, or the reality is more complicated than the rumors suggest."

"Maybe the reputation is perfectly accurate."

"Maybe." A faint smile ghosted across her lips. "But monsters don't usually corner forensic accountants in break rooms demanding justification. They don't care what anyone thinks."

She'd done it again. Turned my own approach back on me, found the contradiction at the heart of my performance. I wanted her to see me as dangerous, but I also, for reasons I wasn't going to examine, wanted her to see past the danger to whatever lay beneath.

"You should be afraid of me," I said quietly.

"Probably." She took a sip of her coffee, calm as still water. "But I spent the early part of my life being afraid of what people might really be underneath their masks. At some point, you get tired of the fear. You just want to know the truth."

"Even if the truth is ugly?"

"Especially then." She set down her mug and gathered herself to leave. "The ugly truths are the ones that matter most. They're the ones people work hardest to keep hidden."

She walked past me toward the door, close enough that I caught the scent of her, coffee and something plain, like soap. At the threshold, she paused.

"I'll have more questions for you tomorrow, Mr. Steele. About the Harrington case. Specifically about a shell company called Meridian Holdings that appears in your discovery documents."