How Long Have You Known

Reginald came home from the hospital thinner, slower, but sharper-eyed than I'd seen him in years — the kind of clarity, I think, that only shows up once a man has nothing left to protect.

He called a meeting in the same room where Weston had announced my firing to the board, except this time it was just family, and me, standing by the door because Constance had asked me to be there, and because for the first time in thirty years, nobody told me to leave.

"I'm making a statement tomorrow," Reginald said. "Full account. The scaffold. The inspector. The payphone call. All of it. Isaiah Voss gets whatever this family has to give him, and it won't be enough, but it will be everything."

"You'll destroy us," Weston said. "The stock, the contracts, everything I've spent two years rebuilding—"

"Two years," Reginald repeated, quiet. "Funny. You've run this company two years. I've carried this thirty. Tell me, Weston — how long have you known?"

The room went very still.

Weston's mouth opened, then closed.

"I found the old inspector's payment ledger in the archive four years ago," he said finally, low. "Before I even had a real title here. I never told anyone. I kept it. Because a man who knows a secret like that about the chairman gets handed a company early, if he's patient. If he's quiet."

Constance made a sound like she'd been struck.

"You knew," I said. "You knew this whole time, and you fired me anyway — to make sure it never surfaced before you got everything you wanted from him."

"It wasn't personal," Weston said, echoing his own words from the boardroom, and for the first time they sounded exactly as hollow as they'd always been.

Reginald looked at his grandson for a long moment — not with anger, which might have been easier, but with something closer to grief.

"Get him out of this house," he told the lawyer standing near the door. "And get me Isaiah Voss's number. Tonight."