Chapter 6
The photograph became stronger evidence when Rebecca located the photographer.
Claire had asked a hotel employee to take the picture on her phone.
The original image remained in Claire’s old cloud backup.
Its higher resolution showed what the framed print did not.
Adrian was clearly visible in the reflection.
Sabine was too.
They were standing together near the hotel entrance.
Claire had almost certainly known they were there.
More importantly, the original image was taken forty minutes after a meeting listed on Claire’s calendar:
A. Vale / S. Lane — Harbor Room.
Cassian read the entry several times.
Sabine had lied from the beginning.
Not about meeting Cassian.
About never knowing Claire.
Rebecca found another calendar entry for the following morning.
Follow-up. No excuses. Bring originals.
No names.
But the timing was obvious.
“Did she confront them?” Cassian asked.
“We don’t know yet.”
A former Rinaldo Marine compliance employee remembered Claire calling from Halifax.
“She asked what happens if a vendor repays questionable billing before an audit finishes.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That repayment doesn’t erase falsified invoices.”
“And?”
“She said, ‘That’s what I thought.’”
The employee also remembered Claire sounding disappointed rather than frightened.
That distinction mattered to Cassian.
Claire had not discovered some terrifying criminal conspiracy.
She had discovered people she trusted stealing from a legitimate business.
Rebecca found no evidence Adrian or Sabine harmed Claire.
No suspicious contact around the highway accident.
No hidden connection to the truck driver.
The death remained exactly what investigators had always concluded.
An accident.
Cassian hated that in a strange way.
If Adrian had killed Claire, rage would have simplified everything.
Instead, the truth was painfully ordinary.
Claire found fraud.
She intended to expose it.
Then she died before she could.
Adrian and Sabine got lucky.
And instead of using that luck to stop, repay the money, or confess, they buried what Claire had found.
Rebecca looked at Cassian across the conference table.
“People often imagine a huge secret requires a huge crime.”
“What are you saying?”
“Sometimes the secret is just that they had years to tell you the truth and chose not to.”
Cassian looked again at Sabine standing in Claire’s photograph.
A woman he had planned to marry.
Standing beside his wife years before they supposedly met.
May you like
The relationship had begun with a lie.
He still did not know how deliberately.
