PART 2 Three hundred people watched my fiancé destroy me at the altar 3009 - Puretale

My mother’s voice remained in the room long after the speakers fell silent. I could still hear the impatience in it, the familiar sharpness she used whenever someone tried to distract her from a question she had already decided deserved an answer.

Peter, I reviewed the Mercer projections.

I had spent three years wishing I could hear her speak again.

Now I wanted to ask her a thousand questions, and she was no longer here to answer any of them.

Dad stood beside the desk, his hands resting on the back of a chair.

“Where did that recording come from?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Alexander closed the laptop but didn’t shut it down.

“The email may have been sent by someone who had access to your mother’s files.”

“Or someone who recorded that conversation.”

“Possibly.”

I looked at him.

“You keep saying that.”

“Because we have evidence of a conversation, not evidence of the person who sent it or their intentions.”

“Someone knows what happened three years ago. Someone knows about Mercer, Peter, my father’s debt, and Mason’s suspicions. How many possibilities do we need before we admit this is deliberate?”

Alexander considered me.

“None. I already believe it’s deliberate.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

“Proof of who is responsible.”

His restraint irritated me.

It was also, I suspected, the reason he had survived in business long enough to become the kind of man other people feared.

I turned to Dad.

“Did Mom tell you she was investigating Peter?”

“No.”

“Did she tell you about Mercer?”

“She mentioned that she didn’t like their distribution agreement. I thought it was another one of her concerns about the business.”

“Another one?”

Dad winced.

“She worried about everything.”

“No, she paid attention.”

The words came out harsher than I intended.

He lowered his eyes.

Immediately, I regretted them.

“Dad, I’m not saying you didn’t care. I’m saying she saw something you didn’t.”

“I know.”

He sat down heavily.

“I should have listened.”

I sat beside him.

“You can’t spend the rest of your life punishing yourself for something you didn’t understand.”

“Your mother understood more than I did.”

“She understood people. That was different.”

I looked at the laptop.

“Maybe we should try to find the original recording.”

Alexander nodded.

“I’ll have my forensic team examine the file, but I’d like to know where your mother kept her personal documents. Not just the company records.”

“The attic,” Dad said. “And her old office.”

“Did she have a computer?”

“Two. One at the company, one here.”

“Do you still have them?”

Dad looked at me.

“The home computer is in the basement. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.”

I understood that better than I wanted to.

Grief had made us both collectors of useless things.

Mom’s winter coat still hung in the hall closet. Her favorite mug sat in the back of a kitchen cabinet. Dad had kept her old laptop because deleting it had felt too much like admitting she would never come back to finish whatever she had been doing.

“Let’s look at it,” I said.

The basement smelled of cardboard and old wood. We found the computer beneath a folding table, wrapped in a bedsheet.

Alexander crouched beside it.

“Do you have the power cable?”

“In a drawer somewhere,” Dad said.

We spent ten minutes looking for it.

When the screen finally flickered to life, the operating system asked for a password.

Dad tried Mom’s birthday.

Wrong.

Her old office number.

Wrong.

The name of the dog we’d had when I was a child.

Wrong.

I sat on the floor, staring at the prompt.

“What would she have used?”

Dad thought for a moment.

“Something she could remember.”

“That narrows it down to everything she ever knew.”

Alexander leaned against a shelf.

“What mattered to her?”

“My family.”

“Too obvious.”

“The company.”

“Too broad.”

I stared at the screen.

Then I remembered a conversation from the last summer Mom had been alive.

We had been sitting on the porch, watching the employees leave the factory for the evening. She had been tired that day, her illness making even small movements difficult.

I had asked her why she still insisted on checking the apprenticeship program reports when other people could do it.

She had said, Because people deserve at least one person who remembers what they were promised.

I tried the word promise.

The computer opened.

For a moment, nobody spoke.

Then Dad let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh.

“Of course.”

Mom’s desktop appeared, cluttered with spreadsheets, scanned documents, and photographs.

Alexander moved closer but waited for me to take control.

I opened the documents folder.

There were hundreds of files.

Most were ordinary business records, but a folder near the bottom had no title. Its icon was an unremarkable gray rectangle.

Inside were scanned contracts, photographs of handwritten notes, and a series of spreadsheets dated over six months.

The first spreadsheet contained Mercer’s original financial projections.

The second contained revised versions.

I opened them side by side.

“Look at this.”

Alexander crouched beside me.

The original projections assumed Mercer would increase orders by twenty percent annually. The revised projections used the same sales figures but shifted the distribution costs back onto Carter Manufacturing.

The difference was enormous.

“They changed the assumptions without changing the headline numbers,” I said.

Alexander studied the formulas.

“That would make the revised agreement appear safer than it was.”

“Would an ordinary review catch it?”

“A careful one would.”

Dad stared at the screen.

“Peter approved these.”

“Yes,” I said. “But Mom noticed.”

I opened another file.

It contained a list of companies connected to Mercer through registered addresses and shared directors.

At first, the names meant nothing to me.

Then I noticed one that appeared twice.

Lakeshore Industrial Partners.

I turned toward Alexander.

“Is this the same company from Mason’s memo?”

“Yes.”

“Then Mercer and Whitmore Capital were connected.”

“Not necessarily directly.”

I gave him a look.

He sighed.

“Fine. The relationship deserves investigation.”

A second spreadsheet contained dates, transaction amounts, and brief notes in Mom’s handwriting.

Several payments had been made to a consulting company called Bellweather Advisory.

The company had no website. Its listed address was a rented office suite in Chicago. The payments were small compared with Carter’s overall debt, but they had occurred regularly for nearly a year.

“What did Bellweather do?” I asked.

Dad shook his head.

“I’ve never heard of it.”

Alexander took a photograph of the screen.

“I know the name.”

I looked at him.

“From where?”

“A due-diligence review several years ago. Bellweather appeared in the records of a private investment group that specialized in acquiring distressed businesses.”

“Was Whitmore Capital involved?”

“No.”

He paused.

“At least, not in the transaction I reviewed.”

I leaned back against the wall.

“So Mom discovered that Mercer was making bad deals, paying a consulting company connected to distressed acquisitions, and somehow linked to the company Mason’s father wanted to use to acquire us.”

“That’s the outline,” Alexander said.

“And you still don’t think we know enough?”

“I think we know enough to be concerned. Not enough to accuse anyone.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“Do you ever get tired of being careful?”

“Every day.”

His answer surprised a laugh out of me.

It was brief, but it changed the atmosphere.

Alexander smiled faintly.

Then he noticed something else on the screen.

“Emily.”

I turned back.

He was pointing to a document dated four days before Mom’s final hospital admission.

The title was simple.

Notes for A.W.

My fingers went cold.

“Open it,” I said.

The document contained only three paragraphs.

Alexander,

If you are reading this, I have either run out of time or decided that I can no longer afford to wait.

Peter may be trying to protect the company, but I no longer believe he is working alone. Someone has convinced him that the only way to save Carter is to make it available for acquisition. I cannot determine whether he understands who will ultimately benefit.

Please remember what you promised me. Save the people if you can. Do not allow anyone to use Emily as leverage.

I read the last sentence twice.

Then a third time.

My throat tightened.

“Did she know?”

Alexander’s face had become unreadable.

“Know what?”

“That I might become involved with Mason. That someone might use me.”

“I don’t know.”

“But she mentioned me specifically.”

“Yes.”

I looked down at my hands.

Mom had been sick, frightened, and trying to make sense of a business problem that had grown beyond her. She had still taken the time to worry about a future version of me she would never meet.

I wanted to be angry with her for leaving me this much uncertainty.

Instead, I missed her so intensely that it hurt to breathe.

Dad put his arm around my shoulders.

For a while, we sat together on the basement floor.

Alexander quietly moved away to give us privacy.

When I finally looked up, he was standing near the stairs, speaking softly into his phone.

“No,” he said. “I want the original incorporation records, not a summary. Trace Bellweather’s directors, registered agents, and financial connections. Start with the transactions in the Carter files.”

He listened.

“And nobody contacts Mercer yet.”

He ended the call and returned.

“Your mother left us something valuable,” he said.

“An incomplete investigation?”

“A direction.”

I looked at the screen.

“What if Peter was telling the truth? What if he really was trying to keep Carter away from Whitmore Capital?”

“Then we need to understand why he signed the Mercer agreement.”

“And why he left.”

“Yes.”

“And why he never came back to explain.”