After Owen left, I locked the workshop's front door and went straight to the office cabinet. Wade was out, and for a moment I was grateful not to have him watching my hands shake against the key. My duplicate ledger was there, but its folder had been pulled forward, edges no longer squared against the others. I opened it on the desk and laid my copied notation beside Owen's entry. The same abbreviation sat beneath the updated address. I left both pages visible and waited for Wade to return that afternoon, unwilling to turn a disturbed folder into another accusation before I'd asked him.
Wade was at the counter when I found him, going through invoices like it was any other Sunday afternoon. I set the flyer down in front of him without a word. He looked at it, then at me, and I watched him decide not to lie before he'd even opened his mouth, which was somehow worse than if he had.
"I used the cabinet copy," he said. "Your ledger, from 2022. Owen's name, his address, all of it. I mailed him the preview myself." I put my copied abbreviation beside the mailing panel. He glanced at it and pushed it back. "I didn't think that part mattered." I asked him why he'd sent anything at all. "Because sometimes people react," he said. "A man with nothing to hide shrugs it off. A man who panics tells you something." He said it as though he'd tested a faulty lock and was waiting for me to admire the method.
"And if he does neither?" I said. "If he's angry because you printed his name next to my brother's photo and called him a person of interest with nothing behind it but a stance? Anger doesn't prove anything, Wade. Fear doesn't either. You know that. You've watched me get told that for twenty years by people with actual authority to say it."
He didn't have an answer for that, not really, just a shrug that told me he'd known it was thin reasoning even while he was mailing the envelope. I told him this wasn't an investigative leak, it was him going through company files I'd trusted him to leave alone, and that there was a difference between a business partner and someone entitled to everything I'd ever written down.
I took the ledger out of the cabinet right there, in front of him, and told him it wasn't staying in a drawer he had a key to anymore. He didn't try to stop me. He just watched me gather the folder under my arm like something had already shifted between us that neither of us could undo with an apology.
That evening I called Pilar and told her everything, the flyer, the address, the cabinet, the shorthand that had given me away without my ever meaning it to. She was quiet for a moment before she spoke, the kind of quiet I'd learned meant she was choosing her words rather than lacking them.
"That's not an investigative disclosure," she said finally. "That's a business record your partner had access to and used without your knowledge. It doesn't connect to anything we're reviewing, and it doesn't connect Mr. Pell to anything either, beyond the fact that your company once employed him." I asked if that meant I was in the clear. "It means your ledger wasn't the problem," she said. "How it got used is a separate matter, and not one I can resolve for you."