Chapter 8 - Rachel Left Nathan a Harder Truth
There was a second letter.
Shorter.
More painful.
Nathan,
If this turns out to be less terrible than I fear, please do not make
saints out of the dead.
That sounded exactly like Rachel.
She wrote that I had trusted Martin too completely.
She had warned me twice that our controls were weak.
I dismissed her concerns because revenue was growing.
She wrote:
You are a good man, but good men can still become careless when success
keeps rewarding them.
I read that sentence three times.
For days, I had focused on Vanessa’s deception.
Rachel forced me to look at mine.
Not criminal deception.
Self-deception.
I had built a company and mistaken growth for control.
I had built a home and assumed love guaranteed honesty.
Rachel had known better.
The letter ended:
Protect Emma from secrets people call protection.
May you like
I folded the page.
That became the sentence I could not escape.
