The Other Ethan Part 2

Chapter 107: The Other Ethan Part 2 Catherine Marsh had four hours to finish a fraud memo and no permission to look like a woman whose name had just been pulled out of a dead aunt's letter. At 2:30, Leah walked through 445 Park with her badge flat against her palm, past the lobby guard, past the mirrored elevator doors, past every camera that needed to see only a junior analyst returning from lunch. The sentence Ethan had not been allowed to finish followed her into the elevator: If you are Isabella Voss. She watched the floor numbers climb and forced her face into Catherine's useful blankness. If David Choi looked up from his glass office, if Priya asked for a citation, if anyone saw grief before the memo was done, then Martha's building would have learned something Leah had not yet survived knowing. The 34th floor opened around her in its usual low hum of strategy calls, printer heat, and expensive restraint. Leah crossed to her desk, unlocked her laptop, and stared at the third part of the NexGen clinical data review. Site-level efficacy rates. Investor disclosure timing. Five discrepancies that could not be explained by rounding. The work should have steadied her. Numbers had always been the safest language because numbers did not ask who her parents were. Today even the numbers carried names. Catherine Voss. James at Mount Sinai. Elena in the NICU. Isabella on a lab stool, small enough to fit on her father's lap. Leah put both hands on the keyboard and began to type anyway. The memo did not care that the other Catherine had apologized to a child she could not protect. The memo needed a clean argument: internal trial data showed reduced efficacy before Thorne Group told investors the asset remained acquisition-strong. The memo needed page citations, not a daughter imagining a microscope under her father's hand. Leah gave it citations. She gave it dates, variance language, source tables, and one paragraph so clinical that David would never hear the pulse underneath it. At 6:15, when the cafeteria had thinned to late workers and analysts avoiding home, Rachel Okonkwo appeared beside Leah's table with a folded copy of the Financial Times in one hand. "I heard you were on the thirty-sixth floor yesterday," Rachel said. Leah did not look toward the cameras. "Research Room. SEC response assignment." "Did you meet Geraldine?" "I did." Rachel waited, expression careful. "She was thorough," Leah said. "She also told me the restricted section exists." The change in Rachel was tiny and absolute. Her fingers tightened on the paper. Her eyes moved once toward the cafeteria entrance, then back to Leah. "Geraldine told you that on your first visit?" "She volunteered it. Six locked cabinets. Five accesses in five years. Names for four." Rachel set the newspaper on the table as if her hand needed to be free. "Geraldine does not discuss the restricted section." "You asked?" "After my ethics complaint was dismissed, yes. She told me it was beyond her purview and changed the subject. She has not said the words to me since." Rachel lowered her voice. "If she gave you that much without being pressed, she made a choice." Choice was a dangerous word inside Thorne Group. Leah had learned that almost every apparent choice here belonged to someone else's system: Martha's approvals, Pemberton's files, David's assignments, Sebastian's security logs. Geraldine Hoffman had stood in Room 3607 with her pale eyes and careful hands and offered a door that should not have opened. "Or she was instructed to see whether I would react," Leah said. "Possible." Rachel did not flatter her with reassurance. "But Geraldine has survived twenty-eight years by knowing which secrets to keep still. If she mentioned those cabinets, she believes the silence has become more dangerous than the risk." That was the first clean reward of the day: confirmation. Leah had not misread the archivist. Geraldine had not simply been eccentric or performative. The restricted section had a human guardian, and that guardian had stepped one inch out of line. "Has she watched you since your complaint?" Leah asked. "Differently," Rachel said. "Not like security. Like patience. Like she was waiting for someone to ask a better question than I did." Leah let the answer settle. Geraldine waiting. Rachel warned. Ethan holding a letter. The doors were opening, but every open door created a line of sight for the people who managed the room. Rachel picked up the newspaper again. At the edge of the table she paused, the same caution returning to her mouth. "Be careful with Geraldine. She is not dangerous. The people who manage her are." Leah carried those words home at 9:45 and wrote them before she let herself write anything else. April 14. Day twenty-one. Ethan opened the letter. Catherine Voss wrote it after James and Elena were killed. She wrote to the child who might someday need to know. James was not a docket entry. Elena was not a credential. They were people. They loved a daughter named Isabella. Leah's pen stopped there. She had written the name as evidence before. Tonight it looked like a hand reaching out of the paper. She made herself continue. Catherine tried to fight. A trustee had already been appointed. A lawyer told her the people behind the adoption had resources and connections that would destroy anyone who challenged them. Rachel confirms Geraldine never discusses the restricted section. Geraldine told me anyway. The other Ethan called just to hear my voice. The controlled one is armor. The soft one may be the person. For several minutes Leah could not write the next line. The apartment was too quiet. The hidden flash drive, the Moleskine, the Catherine Marsh files, the spare shoes by the door - all of it belonged to survival. None of it knew what to do with wanting. At last she wrote: Isabella is not okay. Leah is not okay. Catherine Marsh has to be. Then, beneath it, because the thought would not leave her alone, she added one more sentence. The fifth name on Geraldine's access list may be the door. She closed the notebook and turned off the light, but sleep did not come. In the dark, the letter and the restricted cabinets lined up inside her mind: Catherine Voss, Geraldine Hoffman, Rachel Okonkwo, Ethan's changed voice, and one unnamed access badge waiting in the records that Ethan had promised to run. By morning, Leah knew she would have to look at the list again. One of those names was going to decide whether Isabella Voss stayed buried or started fighting back.