Page 63 of His Vow

"Sit," she said. She pulled the second chair around to my side of the desk.

I sat. I pulled up the photographs on my phone and handed it to her.

She scrolled in silence. Her dark bob fell forward, hiding her expression. Her thumb moved across the screen — page after page, NDA after NDA, settlement after settlement. Her jaw tightened with each swipe. She reached my mother's letter. Read it twice. Looked at the photograph of Hugh laughing. Set the phone on the desk.

"Whatever you decide," she said, "I'm here. And the gallery survives either way. We'll figure it out."

I picked up the phone. Scrolled back to one file. Reeves, A. The signature — small, unsteady, the handwriting of someone whose hand was shaking. My father's signature beside it. The two losses of my life colliding in a single document. Nolan lied to me because of what was on this page. My father destroyed a girl because of what was on this page. The entire architecture of my heartbreak traced back to this signature.

I could put the phone in a drawer. Go back to being Hugh Lattimore's daughter. Accept the gallery on his terms, the lease on his terms, the life on his terms. The cage was beautiful and the man who built it loved me in the only way he knew how.

My mother's handwriting. This isn't who you are. This isn't who I married. A woman asking a man to be better. A plea that went unanswered. She couldn't stop him. Rhys couldn't stop him. Nolan tried with fifteen years of revenge, and it only made things worse.

I called Rhys. He picked up on the first ring.

"I'm going. Are you with me?"

"Yes."

Brother and sister. The Lattimore children walking into a federal building with photographs of their father's crimes on a phone.

The elevator took us to the fourth floor. A long hallway. Fluorescent lights.

Rhys walked beside me, his hands in his pockets, his jaw set. He looked straight ahead. I looked straight ahead. We didn't speak because there was nothing left to say that the documents on my phone wouldn't say louder.

The woman behind the desk had short gray hair and reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She looked at us over the glasses when we sat down.

I set my phone on the desk. "My name is Soleil Lattimore. My father is Hugh Lattimore. I have evidence of a pattern of coercion, financial intimidation, and forced nondisclosure agreements spanning decades." My voice was steady. My hands were not. I pressed them flat on my thighs. "I'd like to file a report."

She picked up the phone, scrolled through the first three pages, set it down, picked up her desk phone, and dialed.

For the next two hours, I answered questions. Names. Dates. The structure of the settlements. The shell companies. The routing of the payments.

Rhys corroborated — the things he witnessed, the choices he didn't stop. His voice shook as he spoke about Adira. He gripped the arm of his chair so hard his knuckles went white. But he didn't leave. He stayed in the chair. He owed Adira that much and more, and this was the beginning of more.

When it was done, we walked outside. Stood on the steps. The city moved around us — the taxis, pedestrians, a woman pushing a stroller, a man on his phone laughing about something that had nothing to do with us. The world continued as if two people hadn't just set fire to their own family.

Rhys looked at me. "He'll never forgive us."

"I know."

"Are you okay?"

I stood on those steps and let the question land. I'd lost my father to the truth. I'd lost Nolan to lies. The life I thought I had dissolved the moment two men in a corridor said words I wasn't supposed to hear. I'd just turned in the man who raised me, and the only person I wanted to call was the one I'd told not to.

"No," I said. "But I will be."

The Vanguard office was quieter than it should have been. Fewer people in the corridor. A tension in the air I didn't understand. I didn't know about the deals dying, the contacts going cold, the lawsuits. I only knew that the man sitting at his desk when I walked through the door looked like he'd aged a year in a week.

Nolan looked up. His eyes found mine, and the hope that broke across his face was unbearable — naked, desperate, the face of a man who hadn't slept and had been waiting for this door to open since I told him not to call. His lips parted. His hands gripped the edge of his desk. His whole body leaned toward me like a plant toward light.

"I took the files to the authorities." I stopped 3 ft. from his desk. My voice was even. My hands were clasped in front of me. "My father's files. The NDAs, the settlements, your sister's name. All of it."

He stared at me. His grip on the desk went white.

"I didn't do it for you. I did it for me. And for every woman whose name was in that drawer."

His mouth opened. I held up my hand.