Two Little Secrets From My Boss

Chapter 90

Daphne now sat in the armchair across from me, legs tucked beneath her, hands folded in her lap. I watched her face and waited for the thing I'd feared since the first sentence, horror or disgust. The slow rearrangement of her features into an expression that said I married a monster.

It didn't come.

What I saw instead was the sharp, analytical focus of a woman who had survived worse odds with fewer resources. She wasn't processing my confession as a wife absorbing her husband's sins but as an intelligence—methodical, precise, already three steps ahead of the reaction I'd expected.

"Who handled Marcus's estate after his death?"

I blinked. Of every possible response I'd imagined, a procedural question about estate management hadn't appeared on any list.

"A firm my mother recommended," I said. "Whitfield and Associates. They handled the probate, the asset distribution, everything related to his shares in the company."

"Eleanor recommended them," Daphne repeated the words slowly, turning them over, examining their edges.

"The same Eleanor who had been facilitating backroom deals and falsified projections for years. She chose the firm that handled your dead partner's estate—whose office was cleaned out overnight, and documentation of her crimes vanished before the body was cold."

The observation landed with the force of something I should have seen years ago and hadn't. I stared at Daphne, and the ground beneath my assumptions shifted.

"Were the brake tampering reports ever formally filed with a prosecutor?" she continued. "You said the mechanic's report was inconclusive but suspicious. Was there a follow-up investigation? Did anyone petition to have the case reclassified from accident to potential homicide?"

"No. The initial investigation ruled it an accident with suspicious elements, but no one pushed for reclassification. I was in no condition to—"

"You weren’t able to think clearly, which is exactly the condition someone was counting on." Her voice carried no judgment—just the clean, surgical precision of a woman cutting through fifteen years of calcified guilt to reach the facts underneath.

"A man dies on a mountain road hours after confronting his business partner about financial fraud. His office is cleaned out before the funeral. The brake lines show signs of tampering. And nobody—not you, not the police, not a single person in your professional orbit—pursued a formal investigation."

"Gerald threatened to destroy me. The anonymous letter—"

"Told you that you should have been with Marcus. Think about that sentence, Xander. Not as a grieving man reading a threat, but as the analytical mind you've spent your career developing."

I felt the blood drain from my face, felt the architecture of everything I'd believed about Marcus's death crack along fault lines I'd never examined.

"The target wasn't just Marcus," Daphne said quietly, leaning forward. "Whoever wrote it expected you to die on that mountain road alongside him. That argument with your friend saved your life, Xander, and it wasn't part of their plan."

"Who had access to Marcus's office the night his files disappeared?" Daphne pressed forward, her eyes locked on my face with an intensity that pinned me to the chair. "Who had keys and the security codes, who was aware that Marcus kept sensitive documents in a locked drawer?"

"My assistant, and Eleanor, had a master key I'd given her months earlier. The security company we contracted could have provided entry to anyone with sufficient authority to request it."

"Your mother again. And the Whitfield firm she handpicked to manage the estate—did they ever produce a full inventory of Marcus's assets? Documents, digital files, anything that might have contained the evidence he'd been gathering?"

"They did a standard probate inventory. I never questioned whether it was complete. I couldn't bring myself to go through Marcus's things—every document with his handwriting felt like an accusation."

"They knew you wouldn't look. They were banking on your grief to do the work that a shredder couldn't."

Daphne's voice was quiet, but the words carried the weight of a conclusion being assembled in real time. I opened my mouth and closed it.

The connections she was drawing weren't new—they were facts I'd possessed for years, scattered like debris from an explosion I'd never bothered to reconstruct.

I'd been too consumed by guilt, too convinced that Marcus's death was cosmic punishment, to examine the mechanics of what had actually happened.

"You've been carrying this as though Marcus's death was your fault," Daphne said, and her voice softened—with the particular tenderness of a woman who understands the difference between a man who refuses to feel and a man who feels so much he's had to build a fortress around it.

"Your guilt has been a cage, Xander. A cage Gerald exploited every time he whispered your name alongside Lora's."

She sighed. "Your refusal to investigate what actually happened to Marcus was exactly what the killer counted on. A guilty man doesn't ask questions. He accepts punishment as his due and never looks closely enough to see who's holding the whip."

Something broke inside me. A wall I'd built so long ago I'd forgotten it was a wall rather than a permanent feature of my interior landscape simply gave way. The mortar dissolved. The bricks shifted.

And behind them was a space I hadn't accessed in years—raw, unprotected, flooded with grief so pure it didn't even hurt. It just existed, enormous and patient, waiting for someone strong enough to witness it.

Daphne was doing what I'd never been able to do—approaching my past not as a wound to nurse but as a case to solve.

She was applying her intelligence to the darkest chapters of my life, and the effect was like watching someone open windows in a house sealed shut for decades.

The power between us shifted through competence. Daphne was stronger than me in the place where I was weakest, and instead of weaponizing that advantage the way my mother or Bianca would have, she occupied the space with quiet authority and waited for me to recognize what was happening.

I recognized it. The woman sitting across from me was the first person in my adult life genuinely equipped to stand beside me rather than beneath me or above me.

I closed my eyes and let her hold me there—this woman who hadn't flinched or fled. My wife had listened to every ugly truth and responded not with horror but with the most terrifying thing anyone had ever offered me. It was a true, sincere partnership.