He had begun to fear the answer because the possible explanations multiplied each time a new fact appeared.
Laurel also supplied a copy of a staff schedule for the evening of the first dinner.
The scheduling code was unusual.
Instead of a conference or client-development designation, the event was categorized as asset recovery.
Richard had approved the expense personally.
Daniel stared at the words while Mara explained that a corporate accounting label was not proof of criminal intent.
Still, the category revealed how Richard had understood the gathering: not as a memorial, not as an offer of help, but as a hunt for property.
Later that afternoon Jessica met Priya Desai at a separate office.
Priya advised her to document workplace pressure without altering company files or attempting to access systems from which she had been suspended.
She explained that Richard’s position as her supervisor mattered, but it did not erase Jessica’s responsibility for her own conduct.
Jessica had to make a truthful chronology of their meetings, financial promises, and any instructions to destroy records.
Priya also encouraged her to seek counseling independent of the legal dispute.
Jessica did something difficult that night.
She opened a notebook and wrote the date of every private dinner she could remember, including dates that contradicted stories she had told Daniel.
She wrote down the hotel where Richard first kissed her, the message in which he claimed his marriage had ended, the morning she asked whether Caroline knew, and the week he demanded access to her private photographs.
She recorded an uncomfortable detail: after Richard stopped offering information about Peter, Jessica had continued seeing him because she wanted to feel chosen.
That sentence cost her more honesty than all the accusations she could make about his manipulation.
At two in the morning she called her friend Hannah, a nurse who had known Peter at school.
She did not tell Hannah the lurid details of the affair.
She said she had made decisions that hurt Daniel and asked whether Hannah could stay with her the next night.
Hannah agreed, but she also asked why Jessica had not contacted her when the invitation first arrived.
Hannah’s father had served on the volunteer rescue crew at Saint Alden.
He might have recognized the names on the guest list.
“I wanted to solve it myself,” Jessica admitted.
“You wanted an answer no one could take away,” Hannah said.
“That’s different.”
The next morning Hannah brought a box of old school newsletters and a grainy group photograph of Peter’s youth program.
