The next morning, the second shoe dropped. I went to work because I did not know what else to do. I needed the routine. I needed the spreadsheet. But when I swiped my badge at the turnstyle, the light flashed red. Access Denied. I tried again. Access Denied. The security guard, Ralph, looked at me. He did not smile. He looked pained.
“Ms. Flores,” he said, stepping out from behind his desk. “Mr. Henderson asked me to escort you to Human Resources. You do not need to go to your desk.”
The walk to the HR office felt like a funeral procession. I walked past the glass walls of the conference rooms. I saw my colleagues—people I had shared lunches with, people I had helped with their taxes—looking up and then quickly looking down. The hive mind knew the pariah had arrived.
In the small beige office of the HR director, Robert Henderson was waiting. He did not look angry. He looked disappointed, which was worse.
“Scarlet,” he said. He did not offer me coffee. “We received a copy of a civil complaint filed against you this morning. Your father’s lawyer sent it to our legal department.”
Of course they did. They wanted to starve me out. They wanted to cut off my income so I couldn’t afford a defense.
“It is a civil dispute, Robert,” I said, my voice sounding thin and brittle. “It has nothing to do with my work.”
“It has to do with fraud, Scarlet,” the HR director said, pushing a paper across the desk. “The allegations involve the manipulation of financial instruments. As a forensic finance firm, we are held to a higher standard. We cannot have an auditor on staff who is being sued for elder abuse and misappropriation of funds. It is a liability.”
“So you are firing me?” I asked. “Because my family is lying?”
“We are placing you on administrative leave,” Robert corrected, “with pay, pending the outcome of the investigation. But you are to surrender your laptop and badge. You are not to contact any clients. And honestly, Scarlet, you should probably clear out your personal effects.”
Administrative leave. It was corporate speak for you are dead to us, but we do not want a wrongful termination suit yet. I packed my box in silence: a potted succulent, a framed photo of me and Grandpa fishing, a stapler. I walked out of the building at 10:30 in the morning. I stood on the sidewalk of Portland, holding my box, watching the traffic rush by. I had $92 million in a trust fund, but I felt more destitute than I had ever felt in my life. I had lost my family. I had lost my reputation. And now I had lost my identity.
I drove home. I sat on my couch. The yellow envelope was still on the floor where I had dropped it. The silence of the apartment was terrifying. It was not peaceful. It was the silence of a tomb. I needed help. Harold Mayes was a good man. He was a decent, honest country lawyer. But looking at the lawsuit, at the aggressive language, at the viciousness of the strategy, I knew Harold was out of his depth. This wasn’t a property dispute in Cedar Ridge; this was a scorched-earth campaign. I needed someone who understood how to fight dirty. Someone who knew that the law wasn’t about truth; it was about narrative.
I picked up my phone. It was 2:00 in the morning. I had been staring at the wall for hours. I scrolled through my contacts, past the friends who hadn’t texted me back, past the colleagues who had shunned me. I stopped at a name I hadn’t called in five years: Noah Hail.
Noah and I had gone to college together at the University of Maine. He was brilliant, chaotic, and terrible at math. I had tutored him through remedial accounting so he could keep his scholarship. In exchange, he had taught me how to drink tequila without throwing up and how to argue my way out of a parking ticket. He had gone to law school in Boston, the last I heard. He was working at a boutique firm that specialized in high-conflict estate litigation. He was the guy you hired when you wanted to burn the will, not read it.
I hesitated. It was 2:00 in the morning. We hadn’t spoken since his wedding—a wedding I couldn’t afford to attend. I pressed the call button. It rang once, twice, three times.
“Hello?” a voice answered, thick with sleep and confusion. “Who died?”
“Noah,” I whispered. Tears pricked my eyes at the sound of a friendly voice. “It is Scarlet. Scarlet Flores.”
There was a pause, the rustling of sheets. “Scarlet? The auditor? Is everything okay? It is 2:00 in the morning.”
“No,” I said, my voice cracking. “Nothing is okay. I need a lawyer, Noah. A really good one.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice sharpening, shifting instantly from sleep to alert. “Take a breath. Are you in jail?”
“No,” I said. “I am in a lawsuit. My family… my father… they are suing me.”
“For what?”
“For $92 million.”
The silence on the other end was total. “Did you say 92 million?” Noah asked slowly.
“Did you steal it?”
“No. My grandfather left it to me in a trust. A secret trust. He gave me a key on Christmas Eve. He left videos. He left everything. But they are saying I manipulated him. They are saying I abused him. They got me suspended from my job today, Noah. They are destroying me.”
I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. The dam broke. I sobbed into the phone, holding the device like a lifeline. I told him everything. I told him about the rusty key, the storage unit in Maple Harbor, the letter in the safe, the video of Grandpa calling out Paul’s greed, the visitor counter spreadsheet, the hate campaign on Facebook, the yellow envelope.
Noah listened. He did not interrupt. He let me pour out the poison. When I was finished, I sat there wiping my nose on my sleeve, waiting for him to tell me I was crazy. Waiting for him to say it was too messy.
“Scarlet,” Noah said. His voice was not sleepy anymore. It was cold. It was the voice of a man who looked at a knife fight and saw a chess game. “Do you have the originals? The letter? The drive?”
“Yes,” I said. “They are in a safe deposit box now. I moved them.”
“Good. And the medical records? The ones proving he was sane?”
“I have copies, and the doctor is on my side.”
“Okay.” Noah exhaled. I could hear him getting out of bed. I heard the click of a lamp. “Here is what I think. I think your family is a pack of hyenas. I think they realized they missed the meal, so now they are trying to eat the hunter.”
“Can you help me?” I asked, small. “I can pay. I have… well, I have the money technically, but I cannot touch it without triggering more issues.”
“Pro bono,” Noah said.
“What?”
“I am taking the case pro bono,” Noah said firmly. “For two reasons. One, you saved my ass in Accounting 101, and I never paid you back. Two, there is nothing, and I mean nothing, I hate more than greedy relatives using the probate court to abuse the person their parents actually loved.”
“Noah, it is a lot of work. They have a big firm. They are playing dirty.”
“Scarlet, I do not play dirty,” Noah said, and I could practically hear the shark-like grin on his face. “I play nuclear. If they want to sue for undue influence, we are going to give them a discovery process that will make them wish they were never born. We are going to subpoena their bank records. We are going to depose them until they forget their own names. We are going to put their greed on a slide and project it for the jury.”
“Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
“Do not thank me yet,” he said. “Get a courier. Send me everything. The USB, the letter, the lawsuit. I need it on my desk in Boston by noon tomorrow. I am going to file a notice of appearance, and then I am going to call your father’s lawyer and introduce myself.”
“Okay,” I said. “I will send it.”
“And Scarlet?”
“Yeah?”
“Stop reading the comments,” Noah said. “Social media is not the law. The law is what you can prove. And it sounds like your grandfather left you enough proof to bury them. Go to sleep. You are not alone in this anymore.”
