Chapter 3 - VANESSA WAS NEVER JUST A SECRETARY
Ethan sat down slowly.
Vanessa Reed had joined Apex five years earlier.
That was what I knew.
Executive assistant.
Then senior executive coordinator.
Then secretary to the CEO.
What I didn't know was that her mother had been one of Apex's earliest legal advisers.
Margaret Reed-Hayes.
Corporate strategist.
Specialized in private financing.
And according to my father, the woman who first suggested using Whitmore Group's reputation to stabilize Apex.
“Did you know?” I asked Ethan.
“That her mother worked with us? Yes.”
“That she helped create a forged guarantee?”
“No.”
“Did Vanessa know?”
“I don't know.”
The wrong answer.
Because Ethan always seemed to know enough about Vanessa to defend her.
Then Sophie spoke from the bed.
“She said the blue papers were hers.”
We both looked at her.
“What blue papers?” I asked gently.
Sophie frowned.
“They had Grandma's name.”
Margaret.
Ethan's mother.
Sophie had apparently entered Ethan's office because Margaret told her to wait there while she took a call downstairs.
Vanessa arrived.
Saw Sophie holding a blue folder.
Panicked.
Tried to take it.
Sophie pulled away.
Coffee spilled.
Vanessa slapped her.
Suddenly the violence made even less sense as “discipline.”
Vanessa had been protecting something.
“What was in the folder?” I asked Ethan.
He stood.
“I don't know.”
“Then find out.”
We returned to Apex after Sophie was cleared to leave.
I almost didn't go.
Then Sophie said:
“I want my recital dress.”
It was still in my car underground.
And I wanted the folder.
Ethan's office looked exactly as I had left it except someone had cleaned the blood from the desk corner.
That angered me.
Evidence erased because executives disliked mess.
The blue folder was gone.
Security footage showed Vanessa leaving the office with it seventeen minutes after we left for the hospital.
She carried it beneath her blazer.
Where was Vanessa?
Gone.
Phone off.
Company car abandoned near Austin-Bergstrom.
Then Ethan's IT team recovered a scan from his office copier.
Someone had duplicated the folder that morning.
Page one:
PRIVATE SHAREHOLDER RESTRUCTURING.
Page two:
Transfer of 16% Apex voting equity upon “trigger event.”
Beneficiary:
Vanessa Reed.
Ethan stared.
“She owns no equity.”
Apparently she was about to.
What trigger event?
The removal or incapacity of Ethan Cole as CEO.
I looked at him.
“Cole?”
He froze.
In all eight years I'd known him, Ethan's surname was Caldwell.
Ethan James Caldwell.
Yet the internal draft identified him as Ethan Cole.
Then I remembered the old rumor I had always dismissed.
Ethan's father wasn't Michael Caldwell.
His biological father was David Cole.
Founder of the company that Whitmore Group had quietly acquired seven years earlier.
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And Vanessa Reed was David Cole's daughter.
My husband's secretary was actually his half-sister.
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