Chapter 4
"For the past fourteen months," Naomi said, addressing the table in the level, unhurried voice of someone who has done this before, "Mercer Civic Development has paid invoices to a subcontractor called Hawthorne Restoration Partners. That entity is registered to an address in Grant Mercer's father-in-law's name. Victoria's audit identified eleven invoices totaling four hundred and twelve thousand dollars for restoration work that, according to the original contractor's daily logs, was never performed."
The dining room had gone fully silent. Even the servers had stopped moving near the kitchen doors.
"The insurance carrier's questions about cost overruns," I said, "led me to the same pattern in two other Mercer Civic Development projects going back three years. Total misappropriated funds across all three projects come to just under one point one million dollars."
Grant's face had taken on the particular stillness of a man recalculating, in real time, whether outrage or denial would serve him better, and finding that neither one had any material left to work with.
"This is absurd," he said. "Victoria has clearly misread standard subcontractor markups—"
"Hawthorne Restoration Partners has no employees," Naomi said. "No equipment. No business license renewal past its first year of registration. It exists to receive payments and forward them, minus a ten percent administrative fee, to an account held jointly by Grant and Mallory Mercer."
My mother's hand had gone to her chest. My father was looking at Grant with an expression I had never seen him wear in thirty-eight years — not anger exactly, but the particular grief of a man watching the version of his son he had spent decades believing in finally, completely, fail to survive contact with the truth.
May you like
"Dad," Grant said. "You can't actually believe—"
"I've read the report three times," my father said quietly. "I kept hoping I'd find an error in it."
