Nia hesitated, then turned her tablet toward Loretta. "Due diligence flagged one of his vendors," she said. "Lakeside Advisory. One million, six hundred and twenty thousand dollars paid in eighteen months for weekly on-site strategy sessions. No functioning website, no public employee list, and almost nothing in the normal vendor files to explain what they actually delivered."
Loretta read the summary without speaking. The acquiring team had identified the irregularity late in a complicated closing, and Harbor Gate's legal counsel had documented it as an exception requiring a post-closing review. Closing the transaction had not meant accepting the legitimacy of every expense in the seller's books. It meant Harbor Gate now had the authority and responsibility to investigate what the books showed.
"The external auditors arrive next Monday at eight," Nia continued. "They're going to ask for schedules, invoices, purchase approvals, access records, and proof of services."
"Then leave his nomination where it is," Loretta said. "The moment Bradley discovers I was in that chair this morning, anything still hiding in his files may look different by nightfall."
Nia wanted to object, but she knew the look on her mother's face. It was the same look Loretta had worn when a real estate broker had tried to pass off unsafe wiring as a minor renovation, and when a banker had assured her a struggling small business was not worth the trouble of saving. Loretta had made some of her best decisions by allowing the person across from her to keep talking. This time, the person had been talking in a lobby he thought belonged to him.
When Loretta was twenty-three, the building where she worked nights had a sign near the service door that read EMPLOYEES ONLY. It was meant for visitors, but in practice it had been used to keep people like her from appearing in the front lobby while clients were present. She had learned to carry two sets of shoes, one for cleaning and another for riding the bus home, because the soles of her work pair collected a powdery black residue that stained the seats. She had learned that office workers remembered to say thank you most often when a machine broke and somebody needed her to fix it.
For eleven years, Loretta cleaned law offices, banks, medical suites, and hotel meeting rooms after everyone with a business card had gone home. She was good at it, but being good at a job did not always protect a worker from being invisible. She could remember the exact pattern of the carpet in an investment bank where she emptied trash for four years, and she could remember the names of six managing directors who had walked past her nightly without once looking at her face. She remembered because it was harder to forget a person who treated you as part of the furniture.