Only once.
“Then you heard me speak carelessly,” Garrett said.
“Because I was cleaning up your mess.
She stole documents.
She threatened us.
She put a child in the middle of business.”
My mother looked at him.
“You put my child in it when your car parked outside his school.”
Garrett’s eyes cut to her.
There it was.
The real man, slipping through the polished skin.
“Careful,” he said.
Victor leaned forward.
“No.
Keep talking to her like that.
I want everyone to see it.”
Garrett looked to the old man.
“You hear this? He brings in a kitchen girl and lets her accuse blood.”
The old man finally spoke.
“Blood does not make a thief honest.”
The room absorbed that sentence like a verdict.
Garrett’s face hardened.
“You believe them?”
“I believe paper,” the old man said.
“I believe recordings.
I believe frightened guards who start talking before tea gets cold.
And I believe a woman who had enough sense to hide evidence with a child because grown men around her could not be trusted.”
Garrett stood so fast his chair struck the wall behind him.
Two of Victor’s men stepped in front of the door.
Garrett laughed, but there was no humor left.
“You think I’m alone in this? You think I moved docks, accounts, police contacts, and drivers by myself? Half this city eats because I make deals you two are too proud to touch.”
Victor said nothing.
Garrett pointed at my mother.
“She saw one transfer.
One.
She doesn’t know what it means.”
My mother reached slowly into the pocket of Victor’s coat.
Victor’s eyes narrowed.
He had not known anything was there.
She pulled out a small metal key.
Garrett stopped moving.
I had seen that key before.
It had hung behind our loose kitchen tile for two days.
My mother told me it opened nothing important.
That was how I knew it opened something very important.
She placed it on the table.
“I saw more than one transfer,” she said.
“The night your driver took me, he searched my apartment.
He found the copy in the sugar tin.
He found the photo under the mattress.
He did not find this.”
Garrett’s face drained.
The old man looked at the key.
“What does it open?”
My mother answered without looking away from Garrett.
