Chapter 5 - The Shadows in the Ledger
The words on the page burned into Nathaniel’s retina. It wasn't an accident.
For fourteen months, the official police report had been his anchor: A tragic collision on Route 9. A delivery truck hydroplaned across the median. Driver fatigue. He had read the report a hundred times, memorized the badge numbers of the responding officers, even paid for an independent reconstruction that confirmed the wet asphalt and worn tread.
Yet here, written in Elise’s unmistakable ink just twelve hours before her death, was a sentence that shattered his entire reality.
Nathaniel slammed the journal shut, his chest heaving as if he had just broken the surface of freezing water. He grabbed his phone and dialed Vance again, his voice dropping an octave into a cold, dangerous register.
"Vance. Get back on the phone with the traffic division from the October 14 crash. I want the original black-box data from that delivery truck. Not the summary. The raw telemetry."
"Mr. Cole, that case was closed a year ago. The insurance payout was settled—"
"Do it now!" Nathaniel roared, the sound echoing off the high ceilings of his study. "Spare no expense. Buy the data if you have to. And check the port authority freight manifests for Cole Logistics under my cousin Victor's oversight during that exact quarter."
Silence stretched on the other end of the line for three agonizing seconds.
"Victor?" Vance asked cautiously. "Your cousin is the executive VP of supply chain. Are you saying—"
"I am saying find out why Elise thought someone was tampering with her vehicle," Nathaniel cut him off, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge of the mahogany desk. "And Vance? Do not let anyone in the corporate office know you're digging. Trust no one."
He ended the call and sat in the dark for a long time. The house around him felt different now—not just a monument to grief, a mausoleum of lost memories, but a battlefield. Someone had wanted Elise gone. And if they targeted her to get to the logistics division, his sons might still be in the crosshairs.
A soft knock at the study door interrupted his spiraling thoughts.
The heavy oak panel creaked open an inch. A sliver of warm hall light cut across the Persian rug.
"Mr. Cole?"
It was Jo. She had changed into a simple cotton sweatshirt and dark jeans, her hair tied back in a loose braid over her shoulder. She was holding a mug of chamomile tea, steam curling lazily into the air.
"You're still awake," Nathaniel stated, quickly sliding Elise's journal into the locked drawer of his desk.
"Hard to sleep when a house is shouting," Jo said softly, stepping into the room and setting the mug down on the corner of his desk. "Milo woke up crying again. He wanted to know if his mother's stars were still there."
Nathaniel looked up, bewildered. "His mother's stars?"
"The glow-in-the-dark stickers she put on his ceiling," Jo explained, leaning against the edge of a bookshelf. "The adhesives are peeling off. He thought because they were falling down, she was fading away too. I fixed them with some double-sided tape. He went back to sleep holding my thumb."
Nathaniel stared at the mug of tea, then up at Jo’s face. In the dim light, he noticed dark circles under her eyes—not from her own grief, but from bearing the weight of his children's trauma.
"Why are you doing this, Miss Marsh?" Nathaniel asked, his voice losing its corporate bite, replaced by a raw, bewildered vulnerability. "You've been here six days. You don't owe me, my house, or my sons anything. You could walk out that front door right now, take a severance check that would buy you a house, and never look back."
Jo looked straight into his eyes, her gaze unflinching, carrying the quiet strength of someone who had survived storms Nathaniel couldn't even imagine.
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"Because fourteen months ago, when my sister died, nobody stayed," Jo said quietly. "Everyone offered condolences, sent flowers, and then walked away because my grief made them uncomfortable. I swore that if I ever saw a family drowning the way we did, I wouldn't just stand on the shore and watch."
She turned toward the door. "Drink the tea, Mr. Cole. It helps with the ghosts."
