Part 4 — The Woman I Met One Night Came to My Interview, but After My Answer the Smile Disappeared from Her Face

“If Michael has already been exposed, the next person is closer than you think…”

Patricia let the sheet fall from her hand.

I picked it up from the floor.

Outside, the wind chime was ringing again.

“Who is Walter Hayes?” I asked.

Michael did not answer.

But Patricia looked as if she had been locking this name inside herself for years.

“He is the chairman of the board,” she said. “He was my father’s best friend.”

“And now?”

“Now he will be the man who tomorrow turns the whole company against me.”

That night we did not leave the house unprotected. Michael called his lawyer, but the lawyer answered only after three calls.

“Let us meet at the office in the morning,” he said.

“No,” Patricia replied. “I need help now.”

A short silence fell on the other side.

“Mrs. Becker, at this stage I cannot participate in financial matters connected with your name.”

“Why?”

“Because this evening I received documents showing your signature. If they prove genuine, I will not be able to defend you.”

The call ended.

Patricia placed the phone on the table.

Her hands were calm, but something collapsed in her eyes.

“This is how they are trying to make everyone leave me,” she said.

“No,” I told her. “This is how they are trying to make you believe that you are alone.”

Michael looked at me sternly.

“Do you still trust her?”

“At this moment I trust no one.”

“Then why are you here?”

Patricia answered before I did.

“Because he trusts facts.”

At seven in the morning the company’s main building was already full of people. Security guards stood at every entrance. On the electronic boards, the status of the orders shone red.

The board meeting was being held on the tenth floor.

Walter Hayes was already waiting for us there. Over sixty, always with a perfectly tied tie and a silver pen in his hand, which he constantly spun during meetings.

“Patricia,” he said, “this is a very unfortunate situation.”

“It is not unfortunate, Walter. It is planned.”

“You are emotional now.”

“For three years you have been telling me that I am emotional when I ask questions.”

Hayes looked toward me.

“Is this the consultant?”

“This is Eric Cooper, our supply risk manager.”

“The man who frightened the company’s main supplier in five days?”

“The man who established in five days that our own accounts do not match each other,” I answered.

Hayes put the silver pen on the table.

“Be careful, young man.”

“That is exactly what I am doing.”

The meeting began.

Several transfers, accounts certified in my name, and Michael’s electronic signatures appeared on the screen. Everything looked as though Patricia and her chief operating officer had transferred millions of dollars to one foreign company.

The board members looked at one another silently.

“This is sufficient reason to temporarily remove Patricia from her executive position,” Hayes said.

Patricia sat straight.

“And it is sufficient reason to conduct an independent investigation first.”

“It has already been conducted.”

“By whom?”

Hayes did not answer.

I placed a small hard drive on the table.

“This is the original recording, the memory card, and the documents taken from the safe in her father’s house. They show that the presented accounts have been altered.”

The room became chaotic.

“This material was obtained illegally,” Hayes said.

“Then why does it contain your signature?” I asked.

His hand stopped beside the pen.

I played the recording on the screen.

Michael’s face turned pale.

Her father’s voice sounded in the room:

“Walter Hayes and Michael Miller have been dividing the company’s money for years. If I die, their first target will be my daughter.”

No one moved.

After the recording ended, only the ticking of the clock could be heard.

Hayes tried to stand up.

“It is forged.”

For the first time Michael looked against him.

“No, Walter. That is your voice.”

“Be quiet.”

“I sacrificed twenty-five years to protect you,” Michael said. “And now you are putting everything on me?”

Patricia looked at him.

“You knew?”

Michael lowered his eyes.

“At first I was only correcting the accounts. Then I could no longer stop.”

“My father knew?”

“He found out in the end.”

“And he still left me here?”

Michael could not utter a word.

Patricia’s eyes lit up, but she did not begin to cry.

“Why did you not tell me?”

“Because your father ordered me not to say anything until you were ready.”

“Three years have passed since his death.”

“You were not ready.”

“No,” she said. “You simply wanted me not to look beyond the door of my own house.”

At that moment the doors of the room opened. Two investigators entered, and behind them stood a court representative.

Hayes stepped back.

“What is this?”

“A search warrant within the investigation of financial fraud and document forgery,” one of the investigators answered.

Hayes looked toward me.

“You betrayed me.”

I answered calmly:

“I was never on your side.”

Michael sat down on a chair and for the first time heard his own voice in the recording. The words he had spoken sounded again in the room: “We will blame Eric Cooper too.”

He was listening to his own words, but his face had the expression of someone who had discovered another person’s crime.

“Did I say this?” he asked quietly.

Patricia answered:

“You said it. We all heard it.”

Michael buried his head in his hands.

Hayes was taken away. Michael gave testimony to the investigation and later reached an agreement. He returned the money obtained illegally, lost his position, and publicly apologized to the company.

But Patricia was not removed even temporarily. The audit proved that all the accused signatures had been transferred electronically from old accounts to which Hayes and Michael had access.

But I did not feel victory that day.

That same evening I entered Patricia’s office. Everything in the room was still in its place: the books, the accounts, her father’s photograph, and the black bag left in the corner.

Only one thing was missing.

The small bronze bell was no longer hanging on the wall beneath her father’s portrait.

Patricia placed it on the desk.

“I left it at home,” she said. “What happened there should remain there.”

“And you?”

“I am staying here. But I am no longer the same person.”

Several weeks later I became the company’s permanent regional operations manager. My workplace moved to Denver, but I worked in Longmont two days a week.

Between Patricia and me there was no longer that awkward boundary that had weighed down every conversation in the first days. We began meetings together, but we always gave each other permission to leave the room separately.

One evening, during the first snow, I went to her house.

A little boy sat in the kitchen and was drawing a warehouse on a sheet of paper. It was Patricia’s nephew, Noah, who had stayed with her that week.

“What is this?” I asked.

“A road where cars no longer get lost,” he answered.

Patricia poured me tea.

“The child has seen all your schemes.”

“Now he is planning possibilities too.”

“Like you?”

“Worse. He has colored pencils.”

Patricia smiled.

It was a free smile. Not the smile of an executive director, not of a woman who constantly had to defend herself. Simply Patricia’s smile.

Three months later my phone lit up with an unknown message.

“I lost everything, but I should not have gone against you. If you are ever ready, I want to explain it to you.”

It was Michael.

Patricia read the text and held the phone out toward me.

“Do you want to answer?”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Then no.”

I put the phone on the table.

Several minutes later Patricia picked it up again and wrote only one sentence: “I wish you would find peace with your own choices. I am not going back.”

Then she pressed the send button.

I was not glad about his pain. Nor about Michael’s downfall. I simply understood for the first time that some people do not ask for help — they ask you to save them from the consequences of their own actions.

And you cannot always save them.

When I returned home that night, I opened the work folder. In the inner pocket there still lay the small silver watch that Patricia had returned to me after our very first meeting, but which I had accidentally left there.

The watch no longer worked. Its hands had stopped at seven fifteen on Saturday morning — exactly the time when I woke up in her empty bed.

I placed it on the table, replaced the battery, and strapped it to my wrist.

This time, time was moving forward.

And I was no longer running away from it.