C Voss in Hampton Bays

Chapter 110: C. Voss in Hampton Bays The NexGen memo waited on Leah's screen like a loaded confession, and Diana Voss's hidden photograph kept pulling her eyes away from the citations. At 1:03, David Choi's name hovered over the secure-message field. If Leah sent the memo too soon and missed one source, Legal could bury it as sloppy work. If she kept delaying, the SEC response team would file without the contradiction that proved Thorne Group had known the trial data changed before investors saw it. Catherine Marsh had to sound bloodless. Isabella Voss wanted to drag every name into daylight. Leah forced both women to sit still inside her and read the twelve pages again. The document gave her no mercy. Five clinical discrepancies. Three investor disclosures softened after internal review. Two FDA inspection references that did not match the public acquisition narrative. One pattern of executives choosing the deal over the truth. She cut the last adjective, replaced "concealed" with "not reflected," and made the tone so clean David would have no reason to question the analyst who wrote it. At 1:15, she attached the file to ThorneVault. Subject: NexGen Clinical Data Review - Part 3 Final - SEC Response Team. Her finger rested on the trackpad. The memo was not a public weapon, not yet. But ThorneVault preserved drafts, recipients, timestamps, and audit trails. If the SEC pulled internal records, Martha's own response team would hand them a map of the fraud. Leah pressed send. The confirmation banner appeared. Uploaded. Delivered. For the first time all morning, she breathed. A quiet tactical win, nothing dramatic enough for the floor to notice, but the kind that mattered. Martha could rewrite speeches. She could intimidate staff. She could bury a woman in HR behind seven years of ordinary payroll records. She could not unmake a ThorneVault timestamp without creating another trace. Leah opened a harmless Costa Holdings file before anyone walking past could see her sitting motionless. Healthcare competitive landscape. Friday deadline. Normal analyst work. Normal Catherine Marsh. Her encrypted phone buzzed beneath the edge of her notebook. Ethan: "Geraldine Hoffman requested a follow-up meeting. She wants to show you something. Tomorrow, 10 AM, Research Room. She was specific about the time. Morning is the only window when the floor is quiet." Leah read the message twice, once as Catherine Marsh and once as the girl whose real name kept trying to surface. Geraldine wanted to show her something. Not explain. Not hint. Show. That meant paper. Keys. A cabinet. A physical piece of the past that had survived because someone older and quieter than all of them had refused to throw it away. She typed, "Confirmed. I'll be there," and watched the message vanish into the encrypted channel. Then Leah set the phone down and wrote in the standard Thorne notebook where Catherine's meeting notes belonged: Diana Voss, cautious and watchful, old cameo, Wuthering Heights, photo turned inward, dependent-care pause; Geraldine tomorrow at ten, Research Room, will show something; SEC memo submitted, Part 3 final. She closed the notebook before Rachel Okonkwo passed her desk with a stack of folders against her chest. Rachel did not stop. She glanced once at Leah's screen, saw the Costa Holdings file, and kept moving. The small non-event tightened Leah's focus. Everyone on this floor measured everyone else. A strange pause, a blank screen, an expression held one second too long: any of it could become a breadcrumb for the wrong person. For three hours Leah worked like Catherine Marsh had no secret life. She built a table of Costa hospital assets, revised a paragraph about diagnostic-device competitors, and answered Priya's question about revenue segmentation with the exact degree of usefulness that kept a junior analyst forgettable. The more ordinary she looked, the more freedom Isabella kept. At 4:45, the phone buzzed again. Ethan: Ran Diana Voss through Hunt Capital's proprietary database. Seven years at Thorne Group. No promotions, no lateral moves, no performance flags. Aggressively normal. But one anomaly: emergency contact listed as "C. Voss, Hampton Bays." No phone number. No relationship specified. Leah's hands went cold. C. Voss. Hampton Bays. The words did not look dramatic on the small screen, and that was what made them dangerous. Hampton Bays sat close enough to Southampton to share its shadows: Martha's Hamptons estate, the Voss property transfer, the dissolved Voss Medical Research Foundation's last tax filing. Every line Leah had followed through grants, board minutes, and sealed records turned toward the same strip of Long Island. Catherine Voss was alive. Diana had not only kept the name. She had left it where an employer database could find it if someone knew how to look. Not public enough to be safe. Not hidden enough to be gone. Leah pressed her palm flat against the desk until the tremor stopped. Two nights ago Ethan had read Catherine's letter aloud, and the words had felt like a message from the dead: be brave. Now the woman who wrote them had an address close enough to touch. A motherless question Leah had carried without naming it suddenly had a living witness. She started to answer Ethan, then stopped. The encrypted channel was secure, but the discovery felt too raw to send across glass. She needed to hold it whole for one minute before anyone else's fear or plan touched it. Outside the window, the Chrysler Building caught the late light. At nearby desks, people packed laptops, compared dinner reservations, complained about the SEC response calendar. Leah sat among them with a secret so large it made the office seem staged. Tomorrow, Geraldine Hoffman would open whatever door she had been guarding. Tonight, Leah knew the name on the other side of Diana's silence. Her phone buzzed again. Ethan asked if she was okay. Leah looked at the message until the letters steadied. She was not okay. She was standing closer than she had ever stood to the life stolen from her. But the fear had a shape now, and so did the next step. She typed back, "Better than I've been in a long time." Then she locked her screen, left Catherine Marsh's ordinary notes on the desk, and carried the name C. Voss into the elevator like contraband. Tomorrow at ten, Geraldine would show her what Diana had known. After that, Hampton Bays would no longer be a place on Ethan's screen. It would be a door Leah had to decide whether to knock on.