Chapter 2 - The Ledgers and the Leather Purse
We didn’t go back to the fancy penthouse Blake had rented for the wedding night. We went home to our tiny two-bedroom apartment in Queens, the one with the chipped blue paint on the front door and the fire escape where I’d sat every night for six months, going through Harrington Group files until my eyes burned. Mom made chamomile tea, the same way she always did when I was stressed, and we sat at our rickety kitchen table, the USB drive lying between us like a bomb.
“I thought you were just dating a rich boy,” she said, stirring her tea, her voice soft. “I thought you were happy.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” I said, reaching across the table to cover her hand with mine. “If I’d told you, the Harringtons would have figured it out. They have people everywhere—private investigators, cops on their payroll, even a judge or two. The less you knew, the safer you were.”
She nodded, and reached for her worn-out leather purse—the same one she’d carried for ten years, scuffed at the corners, held together with duct tape on the inside. She unzipped it, rummaged around, and pulled out a thick stack of paper, held together with a rubber band. It was old, yellowed at the edges, covered in her neat, looping handwriting.
“I kept these too,” she said, sliding them across the table. “For twenty years. I was scared to show anyone, scared they’d come after you.”
I picked up the stack, my heart hammering. The first page was dated 2006, the year I turned seven. It was a log of payments: Elias Voss – office cleaning – $200 cash*, *Harrington Group – post-party cleanup – $350 check, Voss Industries – private residence – $500, no receipt. Every entry had a note in the margins: Saw men carrying boxes marked “medical supplies” out of Voss’s office at 2 a.m., Patricia Harrington yelled at a girl who looked scared, said “if you tell anyone, we’ll send you back”, William gave Voss a brown envelope full of cash, said “the shipment is on schedule”.
“Mom,” I said, my voice tight. “What is this?”
“Elias Voss,” she said, and her hands shook a little when she said his name. “He’s a billionaire. Owns half the hotels in Miami, half the shipping lines that come through the port. Back when I was cleaning offices to put food on the table, I cleaned his main headquarters in Manhattan for five years. I saw things. Things no one should ever see. Girls, young girls, locked in the basement offices, their passports taken away. Men counting stacks of cash so big they needed wheelbarrows. Voss found out I was keeping notes. He came to our apartment one night, banged on the door, held a gun to my head while you were asleep in your room. Told me if I ever showed anyone those notes, he’d kill you. So I hid them. I stopped cleaning his offices, started my own business, tried to forget. But when you started dating Blake Harrington? I knew. I knew the Harringtons worked for him. I knew it wasn’t a coincidence.”
I stared at her, my throat tight. All those years I thought she was just a tired single mom, working too hard, worrying too much. She’d been carrying a secret this big, protecting me, for two decades.
“Elias Voss,” I said, flipping through the ledgers I’d pulled from the USB drive. There it was—his name, redacted in every public record, but I’d found it in the private email threads between Blake and his dad. E.V. wants the next payment by Friday, E.V. says if we don’t cover the losses, he’ll pull the plug. “He’s the silent partner. The Harringtons were just the face. Voss is the one running everything.”
My phone buzzed on the table. It was my old FBI handler, Special Agent Carter—no relation to Mom, just a weird coincidence—texting me: Turn on the news. Now.
I grabbed the remote, flipped on the TV. Every channel was covering the wedding. Billionaire Harrington Family Arrested At Wedding For Fraud, the headline blared, and there was the clip of me speaking into the mic, of Blake being led out in cuffs, of the projection screen with the spreadsheets. The ticker at the bottom read: #GraceTookDownTheHarringtons trending #1 worldwide.
Then the doorbell rang.
Mom and I froze. It was 1 a.m. No one we knew came over at 1 a.m. I grabbed the baseball bat we kept by the front door—Mom’s idea, after the Voss incident—and tiptoed to the peephole.
There was no one there. Just a small brown cardboard package, sitting on the welcome mat.
I opened the door, looked left and right down the empty hallway, then picked it up. It was light, no return address. I carried it back to the kitchen, set it on the table, and cut the tape with a knife.
Inside was a single photo. It was Mom, asleep in our living room armchair, taken through our kitchen window the night before. Taped to the bottom was a note, typed in plain black font: Stop digging. Or the next photo will be of her in a body bag.
My blood ran cold. I looked up at Mom, who was staring at the photo, her face pale.
“Voss,” she said. “He knows we have the notes.”
I grabbed my phone, called Agent Carter. He picked up on the first ring.
May you like
“Grace,” he said, before I could even speak. “We just found out the Harringtons aren’t talking. They’re scared. Scared of someone bigger. We think Elias Voss is the one pulling all the strings. And if he’s already threatening your mom? We don’t have much time.”
I looked at the photo, at Mom’s old ledgers, at the USB drive holding the Harringtons’ secrets. The wedding was just the opening act. The real war was just starting.
