The Account Nobody Was Supposed to Find
Chapter 06 - The Account Nobody Was Supposed to Find
She showed her father the text the next morning, watching his face carefully as he read it.
He was sitting at the kitchen table when she came down, still in yesterday's clothes, a cup of coffee gone cold in front of him, the specific posture of a man who hadn't slept either.
Victor's expression didn't change the way she expected it to. He didn't look confused. He looked like a man reading a message he'd been waiting three decades to receive.
His hand, holding the phone, went very still.
"Who is Preston Okafor," Ava asked.
She said the name carefully, like it might mean something different depending on how it was pronounced, like the shape of the syllables themselves might unlock whatever her father was so clearly guarding.
Victor set the phone down slowly. "Someone I haven't thought about directly in a very long time. Or someone I've thought about constantly and simply learned never to say his name out loud."
"That's not an answer."
"He was my business partner," Victor said finally, "when I started the first version of what became Hayes Industries. Forty-one years ago. We built the original logistics contracts together, split fifty-fifty on paper."
He looked down at the table, not at her, his voice dropping to something considerably quieter than his usual boardroom cadence.
"He was a better man than me, in most of the ways that mattered back then," Victor added. "He trusted people too easily. I was always the one who read the fine print before anyone signed anything."
"What happened to him."
Victor sat down heavily in the chair across from her, looking, for the first time in Ava's entire life, genuinely old.
"I bought him out," Victor said. "Under considerable pressure, using paperwork I'd had drafted that made his exit look voluntary. It wasn't entirely voluntary. He was drowning in a bad investment I'd helped steer him toward, and I used that vulnerability to acquire his half of the company at a price far below what it was actually worth."
Ava felt something shift in her understanding of her own father, a man she'd always believed built his empire through sheer brilliance rather than anything resembling the manipulation Julian had used against her for three years.
She thought of every framed magazine cover in his office, every award dinner, every story he'd told her growing up about hard work and vision and being the smartest person in every room. None of those stories had ever mentioned a man named Preston Okafor.
"That's not the same as what Julian did to me," she said slowly, though some part of her wasn't entirely certain of that anymore.
"No," Victor said. "It's not the same. It's also not nothing, Ava. I've spent forty-one years telling myself a version of that story that lets me sleep at night. I don't think that version is entirely true."
"How does Julian know about this."
"I don't know yet," Victor admitted. "But if he's found Preston Okafor, or found proof of what actually happened, he has exactly the kind of leverage that could unravel this company's reputation overnight, regardless of whatever charges we bring against him for the embezzlement."
Ava sat with that, the specific vertigo of understanding her rescue last night might not be as clean or as simple as it had felt in the moment, her father's own history now tangled directly into the danger still surrounding all of them.
"Where is Preston Okafor now," she asked.
Victor's phone buzzed before he could answer. He glanced at the screen, and his face went pale in a way Ava had genuinely never seen before.
"He's been dead for six years," Victor said quietly. "Which means someone else entirely sent you that text."
May you like
Ava stared at him. "Someone who knows exactly what happened forty-one years ago, and is using it right now, tonight, to try to protect Julian."
"That's the only version of this that makes any sense," Victor said. He set the phone face down on the table, as though hiding the screen might somehow slow down whatever was already in motion. "Which means whoever sent that message either worked closely with Julian, or is Julian himself, hiding behind a stranger's number."
