“Yes.”
“My name is Olivia Grant. I’m a nurse at St. Catherine’s.”
Mara waited.
“I have a patient who keeps asking whether you got the numbers.”
Her entire body went still.
“Name?”
“Edwin Shaw.”
Mara knew it immediately.
Ed Shaw.
Her father’s partner for almost nine years.
He had retired shortly before Henry’s scandal.
Mara had not seen him since she was twenty.
At St. Catherine’s, she found an eighty-one-year-old man in a wheelchair beside a window.
Ed had once been enormous.
Six-foot-four.
Shoulders filling doorways.
Now he looked fragile.
But when he saw Mara, he smiled.
“Henry’s eyes.”
She stopped.
“What?”
“You’ve got your father’s eyes.”
Mara sat across from him.
“You sent the records.”
Ed nodded.
“Most of them.”
“Why now?”
He looked out the window.
“Cowardice gets heavier when you’re old.”
Mara waited.
Ed had known.
Not everything.
Enough.
Henry called him three days before investigators found the money.
“He said if something happened, I should take copies to the state.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Ed’s face tightened.
“My wife was sick. Pension paperwork wasn’t final. Baines came to see me.”
Mara said nothing.
“He didn’t threaten me directly.”
“What did he say?”
“That people who made accusations without proof could lose more than reputations.”
Ed looked at his hands.
“I had a mortgage. Medical bills. A wife dying of ovarian cancer.”
“So you stayed quiet.”
“Yes.”
Mara expected anger.
Instead, she felt tired.
Another frightened person.
Another silence.
“What changed?”
“Your mother.”
Mara frowned.
“Mom?”
“She called me eight months ago.”
“Why?”
“She found your father’s old notebook while cleaning the attic.”
Joyce had not mentioned this.
Ed continued.
“She asked if I recognized the numbers.”
“I did.”
“What were they?”
“Old evidence items Baines used during narcotics operations.”
“You knew?”
“I suspected.”
“Did Dad?”
“He knew enough.”
Ed looked at her.
“He was going to the state the week the money appeared.”
Mara’s eyes filled.
“Did he know you didn’t help?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
Ed smiled sadly.
“Nothing.”
That somehow hurt more.
Ed reached toward the drawer beside him.