The Boy with Her Eyes

Chapter 19

The Meridian Group contract is worth more than everything I've earned in my life combined—and apparently someone sent it to their direct competitor using my login at three-fourteen on a Tuesday morning, when I was asleep in a hostel bunk dreaming about potato-dinosaurs.

Edmund's office door is open when I reach the third floor, which is how I know. His door is never open before nine unless something has gone incredibly wrong.

James Ashford is in the chair I usually face, and Edmund is behind the desk with his hands flat on the surface like he's holding the building down. Neither of them is holding coffee—another diagnostic I didn't need.

"Close the door, please." Edmund's voice is stripped clean—no warmth, no cedar-scented morning greeting, no cup waiting on my desk. James doesn't look at me, which is worse than if he'd stared.

"The Meridian contract was forwarded to Hatch & Lowe at three-fourteen this morning." Edmund pushes a printout across the desk, his wedding ring catching the overhead light. "From your account."

My eyes hit the page—my email, my credentials, a timestamp eight hours old. The forwarded attachment: full contract terms, client financials, proprietary fee structure. Everything Hatch & Lowe would need to undercut us by noon.

"I didn't send that." My voice comes out level, and the steadiness surprises even me, because underneath it my pulse is hammering fast enough to register on seismographic equipment.

"Your credentials, your access point." James speaks for the first time, arms crossed, reading glasses pushed onto his forehead. "The IT audit is straightforward, Cora."

"The IT audit is exactly what someone wanted you to find." I set my bag down and unzip the front pocket. The folder is where it's been for three weeks—growing thicker while I hoped I'd never need it, knowing I would.

Edmund's eyes track the folder as I place it on his desk. Manila, tab-indexed, heavier than anything I've produced for a client—my insurance policy against the moment someone with better credentials decided I was disposable.

"What is this?" James reaches for it, but I keep my hand flat on the cover until both of them are looking at me and not at each other.

"Three weeks of documentation." I open to the first tab and turn it to face them. "Server log from October third—Whitmore emails manually redirected to a buried archive folder. Activity log shows a fourth-floor terminal, Accounts department."

I flip to the second tab before either of them can interrupt. "Shared-drive edit history from pitch night—the figures I entered correctly were altered at six-forty-seven p.m. from workstation four-twelve, Elisa Pemberton's terminal."

James's arms uncross slowly. Edmund hasn't moved, but his fingers have gone pale at the tips where they press into the desk.

"The missing client brief from my first week—deleted from the shared drive at two-fifteen on a Friday. Same terminal, same floor." I close the folder and slide it across the desk to Edmund. "Every incident dated, cross-referenced, and screenshotted before the logs could be cleared."

The room holds its shape around us—three people, a folder, and the hum of a building that doesn't know its walls have cracked. James picks up the Meridian breach printout and studies the routing information with narrowed eyes.

"Check the IP address on the contract forwarding against Elisa's workstation." I keep my hands on the desk because if they drop to my lap they'll betray every nerve currently firing in my body. "Her terminal IP is on page four."

James dials IT, reading numbers from the page while Edmund goes through the folder with the focus reserved for disarming something wire by wire. Every page he turns deepens the line between his eyebrows.

My molars grind while I watch him absorb three weeks of evidence I gathered alone in a building where I have no allies.

"IP's a match." James lowers the phone, his mouth pressed into something sharp enough to leave marks. "Exact match—four-twelve, logged remotely through Cora's cloned credentials. She routed the send through Cora's access."

Edmund closes the folder. His thumb presses a crease into the cardboard, and he doesn't speak for long enough that I start counting heartbeats because they're the loudest thing in this room.

"Why didn't you report this when it started?" He looks up, and the question is clean—no accusation behind it, just something aimed deeper than my answer.

"Because I'm the one without a degree." My throat works once before I can let the sentence out whole. "No corporate history, no references, no name anyone in this building recognises."

"Elisa is Head of Accounts—four years here, polished, credentialed, connected." I hold his gaze because this is the part that costs me, and I refuse to spend it staring at floor tiles.

"If I'd come to you two weeks ago claiming she was sabotaging your waitress—honestly, Edmund. Who would you have believed?"

The silence runs long enough for me to hear the ventilation system. He's running that scenario behind his eyes, and the answer he's finding makes his jaw shift half an inch to the left.

James throws Edmund a glance—quick, loaded, the shorthand of partners who've been arguing without words for years. Then he stands, folder already under his arm.

"I'll handle this." His jaw is set at the angle that suggests he’s about to end someone's career before lunch. He nods at me once—not warm, but something living in the neighbourhood—and walks out.

The door clicks shut. Edmund and I are alone with a desk between us and the dissolving ghost of an accusation that had my name on it three minutes ago.

"I'm sorry." He says it standing, hands at his sides, no performance anywhere in it. "For the position this put you in. For not seeing it sooner."

"I don't need sorry." I reach for my bag because my fingers need something to do that isn't this conversation. "I need to keep this job, Edmund. That's all I need right now."

"The job was never in question." Quiet, certain, and looking directly at me—not at my credentials, not at the folder, not at the middle distance where bosses look when they're managing a situation. At me, the actual person standing in his office with nothing left to prove.

My fingers stop on the bag strap. The space between us does something chemical—thickens, charges, becomes the kind of silence that has its own pulse and its own terrible ideas about what should happen next.

"Thank you." I pull the bag onto my shoulder because one more second in this room means acknowledging what just rearranged itself between us, and I am not remotely equipped for that audit today. "Henderson brief is in your inbox."

I walk back to my desk and sit and press my hands flat to the surface and watch them shake. Both hands, fine tremors, visible if anyone cared to look, and they refuse to still no matter how hard I push into the wood.

Through the glass wall Edmund is standing exactly where I left him, watching me with an expression I am going to be reconstructing at two a.m. for the rest of my natural life.

I press my palms flat and breathe, and the shaking doesn't stop—and for the first time, I don't want it to.