Chapter 3 - My Father Wasn’t the Man I Had Been Avoiding
I called my father from Sarah’s back office.
He answered on the second ring.
“Camille?”
His voice broke on my name.
I had spent two years imagining anger.
What I heard was relief.
“Dad.”
Neither of us managed anything useful for several seconds.
Then he asked, “Did you sign?”
“No.”
He exhaled so hard I heard it through the phone.
“Thank God.”
I made him tell me everything without assuming the USB was true.
The company was profitable.
Victor had been pushing to sell a controlling interest to a private investment group that wanted to close the Riverside manufacturing floor and move most production to Mexico.
My father opposed the plan.
With my thirty-five percent, his twenty-eight percent, and several employee-held voting shares, he could stop it.
Without mine, Victor could control the shareholder vote.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Silence.
Then: “I tried.”
He had mailed letters.
Called our home.
Emailed.
Once he drove to my house, and Jasper told him I was away and did not want contact.
“You came to my house?”
“Last October.”
Jasper had told me that night he had spent the evening alone watching football.
My father continued carefully.
“I eventually thought maybe you really didn’t want me in your life.”
That hurt because it was exactly what I had thought about him.
Two people had been separated by the same lie.
I asked about the cleaning woman.
“Describe her.”
When I mentioned her gray hair and the small burn scar across the back of one hand, my father went quiet.
“Rosa Martinez.”
“You know her?”
“She worked at the factory for thirty-one years.”
Rosa had started on the sewing floor, later became a quality-control supervisor, and retired eighteen months earlier to care for her husband after a stroke.
She now cleaned offices part-time for extra income.
Including Victor’s attorney’s building.
“How did she get the USB?”
“I don’t know.”
That uncertainty mattered.
My father was not magically supplying every answer.
He sounded frightened by the USB too.
“Camille, don’t come to the factory. Don’t go home alone either.”
“Why?”
“Because Victor discovered yesterday that someone accessed files from his office.”
My stomach tightened.
“And Jasper?”
Dad hesitated.
“Your husband has been receiving consulting payments from a company tied to Victor for almost a year.”
My first instinct was denial.
Not because the evidence was weak.
Because accepting it meant my marriage looked different all the way backward.
Sarah touched my shoulder.
May you like
Outside her shop, Jasper’s black Mercedes pulled up to the curb.
He had found me.
