Page 19 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“Noted,” I say. “Continue.”

She looks at me a moment longer, as if she expected the word to cost more. Her shoulders come down a quarter inch. Then she opens the folio, and what’s inside it isn’t a shield. It’s a map.

“Right. So… Some of this might be nothing, and I want to say up front I’m not an accountant, I’m the person who files what accountants send. But you asked what doesn’t add up, and I’ve had a list in my head for about a year, because filing things means reading them.” She slides the first page across the desk.

“One. There’s a subsidiary called Meridian Atlantic Services. It gets invoiced, it pays invoices, it has a letterhead, and in eighteen months I’ve never scheduled a meeting with a single human being who works there. No employees at the Christmas party. No phone extension. I asked Klaus about it once and he said it was, quote, a legacy structure, and it has a nice logo, so I dropped it.”

Meridian Atlantic Services. I keep my face administrative. I didn’t build any such structure.

“Two. The numbers Klaus signed weren’t always the numbers that came upstairs. I proofread his board packages, formatting, typos, that kind of thing, and twice last year the logistics figures in the final package were better than the figures in the drafts the division sent up. Not hugely. Politely better. I assumed someone above my pay grade had corrected something below it.”

Cooked. Between the division and the board, by a hand she was never meant to notice, and she noticed because she reads what she files. The auditors missed it. Zurich billed me three hundred hours and missed it.

“Three, and this is the one that bothered me, because it’s my job to bother about press. Two years ago, there were three business journalists sniffing around the company. One at the Ledger, two trade press. I fielded their calls, I have their names. And then they all just stopped. Same quarter.”

She sits back. “Reporters don’t stop, Mr. Vernigora. You wait them out or you flood them, they don’t evaporate. These evaporated. Like I said. Might be nothing. It’s just the stuff that itched.”

It isn’t nothing. Any one of them might be. Together they’re a shape. A ghost structure to move money through. Massaged numbers to hide the movement.

Sloppiness doesn’t buy silence from three journalists in one quarter. That’s architecture. Architecture needs an architect, and my son, whatever his sins, has never in his life built anything he couldn’t post a picture of.

Thea straightens her pages and waits for me to tell her whether any of it matters, and I don’t say the thing I’m thinking, not to her, not yet.

Someone has been covering for Klaus. Or using him.

9

THEA

I speak more Russian than anyone in this building thinks I do.

I started my second week, after I sat in the lobby watching two security contractors discuss a delivery while looking directly at the delivery, and realized a meaningful percentage of this company happens in a language I don’t have.

So, I got the apps. Then the podcasts. Then a workbook I keep in my nightstand.

The plan was to make myself a more valuable asset and someday reveal it in a meeting and get a raise out of the gasp. Someday never came, because when people believe you can’t understand them, they talk.

So, when the two logistics guys by the coffee machine order their espressos in Russian and keep going, right past the sugar, into a review of the new CEO’s assistant, I stir my coffee with a face as blank as printer paper.

The bald one says my dress fits well, except not in those words. The other one says something about how the boss picked the view for his outer office, and they both laugh, and I smile at them, the smile of a woman thinking about spreadsheets.

“Could I get a medium roast when the machine’s free?” In English. Sunny as a greeting card.

“Of course,” says the bald one, warm as anything, and hands me the pot.

My accent is terrible. I practice against the podcast lady alone in my car, and even Potato leaves the room. But my ear is good. Eighteen months of subway drills will do that, and comprehension was always the point. I don’t need to speak it. I need to hear it, the way I hear everything else in this building while looking like furniture.

No sense letting the Russians know I know what they’re saying about me. And the gossip about my dress isn’t the valuable stream. The valuable stream is the murmurs near elevators, when men who came with the new regime think no one’s listening.

The name Sokolov has come up twice this week, low, not the way anyone says a competitor’s name. Once, from a driver, something like he came back just in time, or maybe only just in time, my tenses are shaky. And yesterday, two of the new security men in the freight elevator, a fragment I chewed on all night.

The old wolf will want to know who fed the dogs.

Meanwhile, upstairs, there’s the other situation. The it-never-happened pact is two weeks old, and both parties are honoring it like tax attorneys. No references. No jokes. Nothing anyone could screenshot. What the pact didn’t cover, because we drafted it in a hurry, is eyes.

There are C-suite meetings now, Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons, walnut table, division heads performing confidence at each other, and I sit against the wall taking minutes because Mr. Vernigora likes a human record instead of a transcript. And his eyes drift.

He’s subtle about it. He’s subtle about everything. I take minutes, which means I watch the room, which means I catch it. The CFO will be lying about receivables, and Max’s gaze will slide off him, cross the table, land on me for two seconds, and go back to the lie with a question that guts it. Twice a meeting. Three times if my blouse has anything going on.