Charles looked up sharply.
“What?”
“I want a written instruction about which records to preserve.”
“You’re not my lawyer.”
“No,” Rebecca said.
“I’m the person who will be asked where the letters went.”
Charles stared at her for several seconds.
Then he told her to include every version.
Rebecca left the office shaken by the knowledge that asking a straightforward question had felt like an act of rebellion.
She had once admired his confidence.
Now she wondered how much of it depended on other people being too frightened to compare what they knew.
Chapter 20: The Repair Bill
At home, Hannah opened a letter from the plumbing company that had repaired their apartment’s aging radiator.
The balance was larger than she remembered.
She checked her bank statements and found a payment that had never been credited.
Ordinarily, she would have put the matter aside until she had more energy.
That morning, she called the office and asked for a corrected invoice.
The clerk apologized for the error and confirmed the payment.
Hannah hung up and looked at the kitchen table.
The small victory did not solve the missing wages from the Meridian.
It did remind her that she was allowed to question an amount printed on official paper.
Noah came home carrying his damaged laptop.
He had repaired the screen himself with a used part purchased online.
“It looks terrible,” he said.
“Does it work?” Hannah asked.
“Perfectly.”
“Then it looks beautiful.”
They ate noodles and compared job applications.
Noah confessed that he had nearly withdrawn from the internship to find full-time work.
Hannah told him that she would rather struggle for another month than watch him abandon a qualification he had earned.
“You’re allowed to want something for yourself,” she said.
Noah looked at her.
“You are too.”
She realized that she had been better at saying those words to him than believing them about herself.
Chapter 21: Beatrice’s Numbers
Beatrice Leland knew that wealth could make people careless about ordinary numbers.
Her father had operated a neighborhood hardware store, and he used to count every receipt twice before closing.
She had inherited that habit even after her work moved into much larger offices.
When Charles presented a revised financing schedule, she noticed that the expected return had grown despite the loss of a profitable parcel.
She called her chief analyst and asked for a calculation from the original source documents.
The analyst returned an hour later with a spreadsheet full of highlighted cells.
