Woke my wife up. Frank shifted uncomfortable. A big, slow, honest man who'd hated making Saturday's call and was glad to unmake it. And there's a note in the file. Nathan official note says the complaint was made in bad faith by somebody with a personal conflict of interest and it's stricken from your record and and there's a line in there.
I've never seen a line like it in 20 years of doing this says any retaliation against you related to this matter go straight to the top to her office by name. Frank looked at him. Nathan, what in God's name did you get yourself into this weekend? Nathan set the wrench down slowly. Somebody looked out for me, he said.
That's all. Somebody with an awful lot of pull looked out for you. Yeah, Nathan said quietly. She does. He didn't see Victoria that day or the next.
He didn't expect to. She'd told him 6 months and he told her to save herself. And he understood that the saving was going to happen up there above him in the world of boards and lawyers and district attorneys. And his job was to keep his head down and do his work and be up the ladder when she was ready. So that's what he did.
But the whole building could feel it. Something had shifted at the top. There was a charge in the air, the kind that runs through a place when the powerful start moving. Executives walked faster, doors closed. There were unfamiliar men in good suits in the lobby who Nathan pegged from years of watching as lawyers.
And then on Wednesday as something else because two of them flashed credentials at the security desk and Nathan had seen enough to know a badge when he saw one. By Thursday, it was in the papers. Not the version Adrien had wanted. Not the version about an unstable woman and a maintenance man. The other version investment executive Adrien Cole charged in multi-million dollar fraud scheme.
Nathan read it on his phone on his lunch break, sitting on an overturned bucket in the mechanical room. And he read the whole thing twice. And there was Victoria's name in it, but not the way Adrienne had wanted her name in it. She wasn't the crazy ex. She was the CEO whose board had uncovered the fraud and referred it to prosecutors.
Cold, clean, untouchable, exactly the way she'd built it. There was one line near the bottom that made Nathan set his phone down and sit for a while with his eyes closed. A reporter had apparently asked at some press availability whether there was any truth to Mr. Cole's claims about Miss Harrington's personal conduct and mental state, and the paper printed her answer three sentences, and Nathan could hear her saying them in that flat glass boardroom voice that a man facing fraud charges would naturally prefer to talk about anything other than the fraud. That she wouldn't be dignifying his distractions, that the documents spoke for themselves, and the documents were not emotional.
She'd done exactly what Marcus said. She'd moved so fast and so hard on the truth that Adrienne's lie never got its feet under it. And in doing it, she'd kept Nathan's name and Lily's out of every single word of it. Nobody knew about the couch. Nobody knew about the gray shirt.