A Contract for Someone Else's Heart - They Were Supposed to Pretend to Be a Couple Only Until the Deal Was Signed - Laura Bellini

INTRO - A Contract for Someone Else's Heart - They Were Supposed to Pretend to Be a Couple Only Until the Deal Was Signed.INTROThe first time I saw Aleksander Radecki was in a photograph attached to the contract I was supposed to save. It was not a good photograph. Someone had taken it during a conference, at the exact moment he was turning his head away from the camera, one hand resting on the edge of the lectern and the expression of a man who had just been asked a question beneath the limits of his patience. Dark jacket, white shirt without a tie, a few unruly strands of hair falling across his forehead. Beneath the picture were his name, his position, and the value of the project. Aleksander Radecki. CEO of Radecki Hotels. One hundred and eighty-four million zlotys. I spent considerably longer looking at that last number than I did at him. "Lena?" I looked up from the documents. Karolina was standing in the doorway to my office with two coffees and that particular expression that meant she was bringing news that required either caffeine or a lawyer. Since we both worked at a law firm, caffeine was the only option left. "If you came to tell me the investor from Vienna pulled the financing, put the coffee down and leave." "He didn't." "Then I may still have a good day." She handed me the cup, but instead of sitting down, she leaned one hip against my desk. "Radecki wants you in the meeting." I looked at her over the lid. "Radecki doesn't know me." "He knows your name." That was a different sentence. I set the coffee down. For six years, I had been negotiating transactions involving people with too much money, too little patience, and an unshakable belief that reading the first page of a document entitled them to argue with the people who had written the remaining hundred and forty. I liked the work precisely because numbers did not take offense, clauses did not raise their voices, and terms could be changed if you knew where to apply pressure. A surname was worse. A surname came with history. "How?" Karolina hesitated for barely a second. "He said he worked with your father once." The office became too quiet. My father had been dead for four years. During the last two years of his life, he had managed to close his company, distance himself from most of his former business partners, and teach me that the question what actually happened? could be ignored for long enough that people eventually stopped asking. I never had. I had simply stopped asking out loud. I turned over the page lying in front of me. "When?" "Forty minutes." "Of course." Karolina gave me a brief smile. "Conference room four. He arrived early." "Men with his kind of money don't arrive early." "This one did." I did not like that either. Forty minutes later, I had the transaction structure in my head, six disputed points, and three ways to drag the negotiations out of deadlock. I still had no answer to how Aleksander Radecki had known my father. When I walked into the conference room, he was standing by the window. The photograph had failed to convey the scale of the man. It was not even about his height, though he was tall. It was more the way he occupied space without doing anything to demand attention. He was not checking his phone. He was not pacing. He was looking through the glass at rain-soaked Warsaw as though he were perfectly capable of making the world wait. He turned when I closed the door. "Counselor Wójcik." "Mr. Radecki." He crossed the room and held out his hand. His handshake was brief and certain, without any performative show of strength. I noticed that despite myself. "Lena is fine," I said. "If we're going to save your deal, there's no point wasting time on titles." The corner of his mouth moved. "Aleksander." "That's still longer." "Alek, then, if you intend to fight for every second." "I intend to fight for considerably more expensive things." This time he actually smiled. We sat opposite each other. I placed the documents on the table. "Your problem isn't the financing. It isn't the price either. The Austrians are ready to sign if they get a seven-year brand-maintenance guarantee and restrictions on the sale of shares." "I know." "So why am I here?" Instead of answering, he slid a thin folder across the table. It was not part of the documentation I had been given earlier. The cover bore the Radecki Hotels logo and a handwritten note: IMAGE PACKAGE - CONFIDENTIAL. "If you're about to tell me that one hundred and eighty-four million depends on a new photograph of the CEO, I'm leaving." "I wish it were that simple." I opened the folder. The first two pages contained a risk analysis prompted by an old article about his previous relationship. The third was a copy of an email from the investor. I read it once. Then again. "This is a joke." "Unfortunately not." "They want you to maintain the image of a stable private life for the duration of the negotiations?" "They didn't include it in the legal conditions. Officially, it's about reputational risk ahead of the brand's expansion into three new markets." "Unofficially?" "The man making the final decision considers me a walking crisis in an expensive suit." I looked at him. "Are you?" "The suit really was expensive." A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. He looked rather more pleased by that than he should have. I turned the page. And then I saw a name I had never expected to find in a professional document again. Tomasz Wójcik. My father. Beneath it was a date from eleven years earlier and the name of the project: Hotel Aurelia. My fingers went still against the paper. Alek noticed. Of course he noticed. "Why is my father's name in your confidential analysis?" For a moment, he said nothing. For the first time since I had walked into the room, he looked like a man who did not have an answer prepared. "Because what happened back then is connected to the current transaction." "How?" "It's complicated." I closed the folder. "I don't bill for answers like 'it's complicated.'" "I know." "You know a great deal for a man who supposedly needs my help." His gaze settled on my face. "That's exactly why I need your help." I should have gone back to the question about my father. I should have done what I had failed to do four years earlier: refuse to let someone change the subject. But Alek took out another sheet of paper. He placed it in front of me. My name was at the top. Lena Wójcik. His beneath it. Aleksander Radecki. And below our names were two words: NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT. "What is this?" "The beginning of a proposal." "What kind of proposal?" He rested his forearms on the table. The smile disappeared. "We have our final meeting with the investor in nineteen days. Until then, I need someone they'll believe." "As a lawyer?" "No." The silence lasted one second too long. "As what?" He looked at me calmly, and for the first time that day I had the sense that every negotiation scenario I had prepared had just become completely irrelevant. "As my partner." For several seconds, the only thing I could hear was the rain striking the windows. Then I looked at Aleksander Radecki's photograph protruding from the first folder, my father's name in the second, and the blank line waiting for my signature. "Absolutely not." Alek nodded, as though that was precisely the answer he had expected. "Then we can start negotiating."

Chapter 1 - Boundary Conditions - A Contract for Someone Else's Heart - They Were Supposed to Pretend to Be a Couple Only Until the Deal Was Signed.Chapter 1 - Boundary Conditions"I don't negotiate relationships," I said. Alek did not move an inch. He sat across the table with his hands loosely clasped in front of him and looked like a man who had known for some time that my first three answers would be no, yet had still considered the meeting worth putting on his calendar. "Neither do I." "Excellent. Then we have our first point of agreement." "I'm negotiating an arrangement." "That doesn't sound better." "It wasn't meant to." I closed the document he had placed in front of me and rested my palm on it, as though I could trap the entire conversation inside. Beyond the windows, rain streamed down the glass in broad bands, smearing the lights of the neighboring office towers. It was a few minutes past five. I should have been finishing a memo for one of the partners, picking up my shoes from the cobbler, and calling my mother, who had spent the last two days sending me messages ending in question marks. Instead, I was sitting opposite a man whose surname was tied to a deal worth one hundred and eighty-four million zlotys and to my father in a way he still had no intention of explaining. The second part was the only reason I had not stood up already. "You said my father is connected to the current transaction." "He is." "Then explain it." "I will." "Now." "I can't yet." I laughed without humor. "Then I think we can end the meeting." I stood, but Alek did not try to stop me. He did not grab my hand, block the door, or do any of the things that movies liked to present as evidence of determination and that, in real life, were mostly reasons to call security. He simply said, "Hotel Aurelia used to belong to my father." I stopped. That was enough. Slowly, I turned my head. "Go on." "Officially, your father advised on the redevelopment and the later sale of part of the property. Unofficially, he had access to documents he should never have received." "What documents?" "That's what I'm trying to find out." I did not sit down immediately. I watched him, trying to decide whether this was another layer of a story designed to lure me into his arrangement. I hated it when people used information as bait. My father had done it endlessly. I'll tell you when you're older. It's none of your business. You don't need to know everything. Over time, I had learned that for some people, a secret was not a burden. It was a means of control. "You're not only trying to save the deal," I said. "No." "What are you really trying to find?" Alek looked away for a moment, the first time since I had entered the room. He did not look embarrassed. More like someone arranging an answer carefully enough not to reveal anything by accident. "Part of the Aurelia documentation is missing. A few months ago, a man appeared claiming he has it." "Is he blackmailing you?" "Not yet." "What does that mean?" "For now, he's selling information piece by piece. One document. One name. One date. Just enough to make sure I know that he knows something I don't." "And my father appeared in one of those pieces of information?" "Yes." I sat down again. Suddenly, the conversation about a fake relationship became even more absurd, but it was no longer the most important thing in the room. "Why haven't you gone to the police?" "Because I don't have evidence of a crime." "What about trade secrets?" "The documents are more than ten years old. Some concern companies that no longer exist. Some may be genuine, some may not. The man I'm dealing with is very careful." "Who is he?" "He calls himself Borkowski." "Calls himself?" "I haven't found anything confirming that it's his real name." For a moment, I was irritated with myself. I should have pushed emotion aside and looked at the situation as I would any other client problem. Someone possessed information of unknown value whose significance might outweigh its actual content. The client was under pressure on two fronts at once: the current transaction and an undefined historical risk. Everything could be organized. If it weren't for my father's name. "What does your private life have to do with any of this?" "More than it should." "Be specific." "Two people on my management board know about Borkowski. I don't want to expand that circle. At the same time, the investor is conducting the final stage of reputational due diligence. If another piece of material appears suggesting there's chaos around me, they may postpone signing." "Another piece of material?" Alek reached into the folder and pulled out a press clipping. This time, he did not hand it to me immediately. "A year ago, I ended a relationship with Marta Zielińska." I knew the name. Actress. Commercials, television series, fashion campaigns. I did not follow celebrity lives, but even I remembered some of the headlines. "Publicly?" "Very." "Did you cheat on her?" "No." There was no offense in his answer, but there was unmistakable emphasis. "Did she cheat on you?" "No." "So what happened?" "We broke up. Then someone sold photographs and a story claiming I threw her out of my apartment the day before a premiere." "Was it true?" "No." "Did you deny it?" "No." "Why?" "Because the real reason for the breakup belonged to her." It was the first answer I could not immediately file under man accustomed to controlling the narrative. "So you took all of it on yourself." "I didn't take it on. I simply didn't deny it." "That's practically the same thing." "In terms of image, yes." I read the clipping. The tone was vicious, but not unusual. Wealthy, cold, ruthless heir to a hotel empire. Humiliated woman. Sources close to the couple. Photographs from a restaurant. The standard mixture of fact and conjecture. "The investor is seriously making this transaction depend on whether you have a girlfriend?" "Not formally. But their chairman, Heinrich Voller, is obsessed with predictability. In his view, a private scandal is a sign that the management may be as impulsive as its CEO." "That's absurd." "Of course." "And your solution is to create another private lie?" "Not mine." "Whose?" "The crisis communications agency's." I laughed. "You pay people for this?" "Too much." "And everyone agreed that the best way to demonstrate stability is to hire a woman?" "I wouldn't use the word hire." "I just did." Alek slid another sheet toward me. This time it was a list of dates. A foundation dinner. A trip to Kraków. A closed meeting with the investor. An industry gala. A weekend at a hotel near Zakopane, where the final negotiating session was supposed to take place. "This lasts nineteen days?" "At most." "And after that?" "We sign the deal. We say we're no longer together." "How romantic." "You asked for specifics." I studied him. He was somewhere in his late thirties, perhaps thirty-seven. In the photograph, he had looked more arrogant. In person, he was more attentive, which did not necessarily make him more pleasant. He listened in a way that made careless answers difficult. There was control in him, but not the theatrical kind. It was more the habit of a man who had spent years refusing to react before calculating the cost. "Why me?" "Because you're credible." "That is offensively pragmatic." "You asked for an answer without the gloss." "Continue." "You're a lawyer. You have your own career. You don't use social media except for a professional profile. You have no reason to sell the story." "Wonderful. I'm dull and discreet." "I didn't say dull." I did not answer. He smiled faintly, then grew serious again. "There's another reason." I knew it before he said it. "My father." "Yes." "So it isn't an accident that I ended up on this transaction." "No." That one word hit harder than it should have. "You requested me specifically?" "Yes." "Before we met?" "Yes." "And the firm knew?" "The partner leading the matter knew I wanted you on the team. He doesn't know why." Heat rose under my skin with irritation. "You brought me onto this matter because I carry the surname of a man you want to investigate." "Partly." "That doesn't improve anything." "I know." "Were you hoping that once we started pretending to be a couple, I'd eventually invite you into my mother's apartment and show you the family archives?" He frowned. "No." "Did you want to use what I know about my father?" "Yes." At least he did not lie. "And if I refuse?" "You remain counsel on the transaction if that's what you want. I won't pressure your firm to remove you." "And the information about my father?" "You'll still get it." That surprised me. "Regardless of my decision?" "Yes." "Why?" For a moment, he looked at the documents rather than at me. "Because if it concerns your family, you have the right to see it." For the first time that evening, I had no immediate response. My father had spent his life believing that a person's right to information depended on whether he considered them ready to receive it. Alek, who an hour earlier had been nothing more than a name printed beside a transaction value, had just said the exact opposite. I did not trust him more because of it. But I began listening differently. "Assuming purely hypothetically that I agreed," I said, "there is no version of this in which I sign whatever your agency prepared." "Quite right." "I write the terms." "All right." "No lying to my firm in a way that could put me at professional risk." "Agreed." "No interfering in my work. No instructions outside the scope of the transaction. I am not your employee." "Agreed." "No public gestures we haven't approved in advance." "Reasonable." "And no touching me without explicit consent." His expression did not change, but his voice became more serious. "That should be obvious even without a contract." That sentence lodged in me with disproportionate force. "A lot of things should be." "I know." I took a clean sheet from the firm's notepad and began writing. "Separate entrances and exits whenever possible. No sharing a hotel room." "In Zakopane, the investor booked couples' suites." I looked up. "Then the investor will learn that people in relationships sometimes sleep in separate rooms." "That will probably cost me less than negotiating with you." "Definitely." I kept writing. "No comments about my family without my consent. No information about my life gets passed to the press agency. If a journalist asks something private, we use a version agreed in advance." "What version?" "The simplest one. We met professionally. We started seeing each other recently. We don't discuss details." "Sounds believable." "Because it isn't overengineered. Lies fall apart when you decorate them too much." "Is that a professional observation or a family one?" My pen stopped above the page. "Both." He did not apologize for the question. He did not press for more. He simply accepted the answer. "What else?" he asked. "Compensation." "Of course." "Not for me." His eyebrows rose. "Excuse me?" "If I do this, I won't personally accept a single zloty." "I'm not offering you a bribe." "I didn't say you were. But if you pay me for being your fictional partner, then any later dispute over my independence becomes a farce." "So what do you want?" I already knew. "You fund a legal foundation my firm works with. Their program provides free legal assistance to women leaving financially abusive relationships. One hundred thousand." Alek was silent for a second. "That's the price for nineteen days?" "That's the condition for me to consider signing at all." "Two hundred." I stared at him. "Why?" "Because one hundred sounded like you were trying not to ask for too much." I had not expected that. "You don't need to raise your own price." "I'm not. If I'm going to use your time outside work and put you in an absurd position, I'd rather someone at least get something useful out of it." I should have dismissed it as an image gesture. It probably was, in part. But I could not find anything in the other part that gave me a convenient reason to despise him. "One hundred and fifty," I said. "This isn't an auction." "Exactly." He nodded. "One hundred and fifty." I wrote it down. Then I slid the sheet toward him. "One more point." "The worst one?" "For you, possibly." "Go ahead." "I receive every piece of material concerning my father and Aurelia at the same time you do. No filtering. No deciding what is too difficult or irrelevant for me." Alek studied me. "That may include information you find uncomfortable." "I'm thirty-three years old. I can survive discomfort." "That's not what I mean." "Then what do you mean?" He hesitated. "I don't yet know who your father was in this story." It hurt more than I wanted to show. Not because I suspected my father of some crime. He had been difficult, proud, and fully capable of making decisions he later defended for no better reason than the fact they were his. But I also remembered mornings when he made my sandwiches for school and always cut off the crusts even though he thought doing so was ridiculous. He taught me chess and never once let me win. He picked me up from my first student party at three in the morning without asking a single question, and the next day all he said was that if I ever could not get home safely, I was to call him no matter what time it was. People were not one thing. I knew that. I did not want to discover how many things could fit inside my father. "All the more reason I want to know," I said. Alek nodded. "Agreed." "And one more thing." "Of course." "You don't decide for me what I should do with that information." His gaze hardened for a second. "If disclosing it threatens the transaction, I'll have an opinion." "You can have an opinion. Not a veto." "That depends on confidentiality obligations." "Then we'll discuss the law. Not your convenience." His tongue moved against the inside of his cheek as though he were holding back an answer. "And that's where our conflict begins." "One of many." "Good to know you're an optimist." For the first time, I smiled deliberately. That was a mistake. Not because he did anything remarkable. He simply smiled back, and for one second that controlled corporate layer disappeared. He looked younger then. Not like the CEO of a hotel group, but like a man who genuinely enjoyed being challenged. I looked away first. "This is not an agreement," I said. "Not yet." "I need to read all the documentation." "I'll send everything tonight." "And I want to meet whoever handles the image side." "A woman." "Even better." "Joanna Maj." "Tomorrow morning." "Nine?" "Eight thirty." "You like starting early." "I like finishing things before they have time to become complicated." This time, he laughed. "I'm afraid it's already too late for this particular one." I stood and gathered my documents. "You still don't know whether I'm agreeing." "I do." "How?" "Because if you truly wanted to refuse, you would have walked out fifteen minutes ago." I was already at the door. I stopped, but did not turn. I hated it when someone was right about me after knowing me for an hour. "And if you really wanted nothing more than a woman for photographs," I said, "you wouldn't have chosen a lawyer who asks too many questions." "That's also true." I looked at him over my shoulder. "Then we both have a problem." "Yes." "At least I haven't signed anything yet." His eyes moved to the sheet containing my conditions. "Yet." I left without answering. It was only in the elevator that I noticed I was gripping the copy of the Aurelia document more tightly than my phone. On the ground floor, my mother called. I stared at her name on the screen for a moment. Then I answered. "Lena?" she said immediately. "Finally. Is everything all right?" I looked through the firm's glass doors at the rain-darkened street. "Mom, do you know the name Radecki?" Silence on the other end. It did not last long. Maybe one second. But it was enough. "How do you know about them?" she asked. Not Who are you talking about? Not I don't remember that name. How do you know about them? And that was the first moment I understood that Alek was not the only person who knew part of my father's history.

Chapter 2 - What Families Leave Unsaid - A Contract for Someone Else's Heart - They Were Supposed to Pretend to Be a Couple Only Until the Deal Was Signed.Chapter 2 - What Families Leave UnsaidMy mother had never been good at lying. She was, however, excellent at selecting true sentences that missed the point with such precision you might have thought she had spent her whole life practicing. "Of course I know the Radecki name," she said. "Your father worked with a lot of people." I stood beneath the awning outside the law firm while rain struck the pavement half a meter away. People streamed out of the building, opened umbrellas, hurried toward cars and the tram stop. I stayed exactly where I was. "I asked whether you knew the Radeckis, not whether Dad worked with people." "Lena, I honestly don't know what you're getting at." "That's interesting, because neither do I. Not yet." A quiet sigh came through the phone. "Are you at work?" "I'm just leaving." "Maybe this isn't a conversation to have on the street." "I agree. That's why I'm coming over." "Tonight?" "Yes." "I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning." "I'll take half an hour." "Lena..." "Mom." I did not raise my voice. I never had to. My mother knew that version of my tone very well. My father used to say that by the age of twelve I could question adults like a prosecutor. At the time, I had not known whether he meant it as a compliment. Now I knew he did not. "All right," she said. "Come over." She hung up first. It took me almost forty minutes to get to my parents' apartment, which was now only my mother's. Warsaw after the rain was one continuous line of red brake lights, and I used the time to read the message from Alek. He had sent the documents faster than promised. The attachments included a draft agreement between us, a schedule of appearances, the media analysis, copies of the material supplied by the man calling himself Borkowski, and a separate folder labeled AURELIA. I did not open it at once. First, I read the email. "Your conditions from today's meeting have been incorporated into the draft. I amended the provision concerning Hotel Aurelia materials as agreed: you will receive everything at the same time I do. Joanna has confirmed 8:30 tomorrow. One thing: if, after reviewing the materials, you decide you do not want to take part in the arrangement, that will have no effect on your role in the legal handling of the transaction. A.R." I read the last sentence twice. He did not need to add it. We had already agreed. He added it anyway. I opened the folder. There were eleven files. Five appeared to come from the Radecki corporate archive. Two were scans of old agreements. One was an extract from a share register. The final three were dated within the last two months and looked like material sent by Borkowski. The first carried my father's signature. I did not open it. I locked my phone. It was cowardly, but I knew that if I started reading while sitting in traffic at the lights on Puławska Street, I would not be able to think about anything else. My mother first. Then the documents. I wanted at least one version of the story before the paperwork began imposing its own. My mother had lived in the same apartment for thirty-one years. Three rooms in Mokotów, parquet flooring my father had sanded himself before I was born, and a kitchen still too small for the number of cabinets packed into it. When I walked in, the apartment smelled of baked apples and tea with cloves. It always smelled particularly domestic when the atmosphere was about to become difficult. "Have you eaten?" my mother asked. "No." "I made apple cake." "Mom." "I'm only asking." I took off my coat and hung it on the hook. My mother looked well. She was sixty-two, with short gray hair she had never dyed and the same direct way of looking at people that I had inherited more strongly than any feature of her face. She had spent most of her life teaching biology. After my father died, she retired earlier than she had planned. We went into the kitchen. Two small plates were already on the table. Of course. I sat down. "Who were the Radeckis to Dad?" My mother poured tea. "He worked with their company." "On Hotel Aurelia." Her hand stopped for a fraction of a second above the cup. "Yes." "What happened there?" "Lena, that was a long time ago." "Eleven years." "That's a long time for a company." "Not for a family." She sat opposite me. "Your father was managing several projects at once then. Aurelia was one of them." "No." My mother frowned. "Excuse me?" "If it were just one of them, you wouldn't have reacted like that when I said Radecki." She said nothing. I knew I had won the first round. It gave me no satisfaction at all. "When Dad closed the firm three years later, he said the market had changed," I continued. "Then he cut ties with two of his partners. He stopped going to conferences. We started having money problems at home that neither of you wanted to discuss. Did that have something to do with Aurelia?" "Not everything had one cause." "I didn't ask about everything." "Lena." "I'm working for Aleksander Radecki now." That worked. My mother moved her cup away. "Why?" "His company is a client of the firm." "It's a large company. Can't they give it to somebody else?" "They can. I don't want them to." "Why?" "Because my surname appeared in documents connected with one of their old projects. Dad's surname." My mother went pale. Not dramatically. Some of the color simply left her face. "What documents?" "I don't know everything yet." "Then leave it alone." She said it immediately. Not Be careful. Not Find out more. Leave it alone. A chill moved under my skin. "Why?" "Because nothing good will come from it." "That isn't an answer." "It's my answer." "Mom, someone is trying to sell Radecki information about Aurelia. Dad is in those materials. If he did something..." "Your father did nothing you should be ashamed of." The way she said it changed the shape of my question. Not Did he do something? But What did he do? "What are you ashamed of?" I asked. My mother turned her head toward the window. I had not expected that. "Don't start interrogating me." "I'm not interrogating you." "You're doing exactly what Tomasz always did." "Which was?" "When he believed the truth was on his side, everything else stopped mattering." That hurt more than it should have. "I didn't know that was his flaw. I thought the problem was more that he never said anything." My mother looked at me sharply. "You don't know the whole story." "That's what I'm trying to learn." "And I'm telling you there are stories that learning the truth doesn't fix." "That sounds exactly like something Dad would say." We looked at each other in silence. The tea cooled between us. Finally, my mother stood. "Wait." She left the kitchen. I heard her open the wardrobe in the hall, then the door to my father's old study. I had not gone in there often since his death. My mother had left most of the room almost untouched for a year, then slowly started taking things out. The books went to a library. His suits to a foundation. She had sorted through the documents herself and refused my help. She came back carrying a small box. It did not look important. An ordinary shoebox. She placed it on the table. "I found this after he died." My chest tightened in a way I hated, because it instantly pulled me four years into the past. The hospital. The phone call at five in the morning. The doctor's voice, much too calm. My mother opened the box. Inside were three notebooks, an old USB drive, and an envelope. One word was written on it. Aurelia. "Why didn't you show me this?" "Because he asked me not to." I looked up. "When?" "Before he died." "He knew you had it?" "Yes." "And he asked you never to tell me?" "He asked me not to give it to you unless someone started asking questions." For a moment, I did not understand. "So he expected someone might?" "Apparently." "Mom." "I don't know anything more." "I don't believe you." "You don't have to." I leaned over the box. "Can I take it?" She hesitated. "No." I straightened. "What do you mean, no?" "You can read it here." "I'm thirty-three." "And these are your father's documents." "My father's. Exactly." "And my apartment." The lawyer in me wanted to say something about title to personal property after inheritance. The daughter in me knew that would be petty and cruel. "Fine." I took out the envelope. Inside were three sheets. The first contained a list of names. I recognized my father. Jan Radecki, presumably Alek's father. Marek Sowiński. Ewa Kaczmarek. Amounts were written next to two of the names. The second page was a handwritten sequence of dates. The third contained only one sentence, written in my father's unmistakable handwriting. "If they come back to the Aurelia matter, the March 14 agreement has to be found before Radecki finds it." I read it again. "Which Radecki?" "I don't know." "You knew this was written here?" "Yes." "And you still did nothing?" My mother lowered her eyes. "Tomasz didn't want me to." "Tomasz is dead." It came out more sharply than I intended. My mother's face went rigid. I regretted it immediately. "I'm sorry." She shook her head. "No. You're right. But death doesn't mean a person stops keeping promises." "What if the promise protected something he should never have protected?" "I don't know." For the first time, she sounded genuinely helpless. I sat down again. "Who was Marek Sowiński?" "Your father's business partner." "The one he stopped speaking to?" "One of the two." "And Ewa Kaczmarek?" My mother was silent. "Mom." "She worked for the Radeckis." "In what capacity?" "Finance. I think." "You think?" "I didn't work with them. I heard names over dinner." I looked down at the list. Next to Ewa Kaczmarek's name was an amount. 420,000. Next to Marek Sowiński: 380,000. There was nothing next to my father. "Can I take photographs?" My mother hesitated longer this time. Finally, she nodded. I took out my phone. I photographed all three pages, then the envelope and the USB drive. "I want to have this checked." "No." "Why?" "Because I don't know what's on it." "That is literally the reason to check." "Lena." "I'm not going to plug it into my work laptop. I'll have it analyzed." "By whom?" I thought of Alek. I did not want to. I did not yet know whether I trusted him. But he had resources I did not have, and he had an interest in finding the truth. "I know someone." "Radecki?" My mother said the name like a warning. "Yes." "Don't trust him." "You know him?" "No." "Then why?" "Because he's his father's son." I sighed. "That's a weak argument." "Not always." "Did his father do something to Dad?" My mother stood. "That's enough for today." "Mom." "I've said more than I wanted to." "It's still less than you know." "Possibly." There was no point pushing harder. I knew her. Once she reached her limit, more questions only made her close further. I saved the photographs, put the papers back, and closed the envelope. "I'll come back for the USB tomorrow." "I'm not promising you'll get it." "Then I'll come back every day." "You got your stubbornness from your father." "I think that's the only thing you two never tried to hide from me." This time, my mother almost smiled. Almost. As I was leaving, she stopped me in the hall. "Lena." I turned. "Your father was afraid of one thing more than losing the company." "What?" My mother folded her arms around herself. "That one day you'd believe everything he did, he did for money." I did not know what to say. "Did he?" "No." "Then what did he do it for?" She looked at me for a long time. "That's what you have to discover for yourself." An hour later, I was sitting at the kitchen table in my own apartment with my laptop, a glass of water, and Alek's documents open on the screen. I did not drink wine while working. Especially not on family matters. The first file from Borkowski was a scan of an agreement dated April, eleven years earlier. It did not concern the hotel sale directly. It dealt with the assignment of rights to a plot adjoining Aurelia. The transaction value was suspiciously low. The second contained email correspondence between Marek Sowiński and someone signing as E.K. The third was a photograph of part of an accounting statement. E.K. 420,000. I froze. The same amount. I reached for my phone and compared the photograph to my father's sheet. There was no doubt. My father had a list of the same payments. Which meant he knew. I opened my messages with Alek. For a moment, I stared at the blank field. Then I typed: "I have something you probably don't have in your documents." His reply came a minute later. "Can we talk?" He called before I had time to respond. I answered. "It's late," he said. "And?" "That was my way of asking whether I'm disturbing you." "If you're disturbing me, I don't answer." "Good to know." I heard some faint noise behind him, perhaps a door closing. "What did you find?" "My father had documents concerning Aurelia." Silence on the other end. "What kind?" "I don't know yet. I have photographs of three pages. One is a list of names and amounts. Ewa Kaczmarek is on it, with four hundred and twenty thousand." Alek stopped breathing for a second. "Are you there?" "Yes." His voice was different. Harder. "Where did you get that list?" "From my mother." "She knew about it?" "Yes." "Since when?" "Since my father died. Maybe longer." "Is Marek Sowiński's name on it?" I looked at my phone. "Yes." "Three hundred and eighty thousand?" Cold moved through me. "How do you know?" "Because I saw that amount in a document you don't have yet." "I was supposed to get everything." "You received everything I had this morning. That document came in an hour ago." I did not know whether I believed him. The worst part was that his answer fit. "Send it to me." "I already am." My computer chimed with a new message. I opened the attachment. It was a scan of a transfer confirmation. Sender: Aurelia Development. Recipient: Marek Sowiński. PLN 380,000. The date was exactly the same one my father had written on his sheet. "Lena?" It was the first time he used my name without formality, and it took me a second to notice. "I'm here." "What else was in the box?" I did not like that he had guessed there was a box. "How do you know there was a box?" "I don't. You said documents. I assumed." "Please don't do that." "Do what?" "Try to lead the conversation one step ahead of me." "It wasn't deliberate." I wasn't sure. "There's a USB drive," I said. "Do you have it?" "No. My mother wouldn't let me take it." "Good." "Excuse me?" "Good that you didn't take it and plug it into a computer." "I'm not an idiot." "I didn't say you were." "You thought it." "I thought that if I found a USB drive belonging to my father after four years and believed it might contain an answer to a question that had been tormenting me, I'd probably plug it in immediately." I fell silent. That was far too accurate. "Do you have someone who can check it safely?" "Yes." "Without copying the contents for you?" A short pause. "That can be arranged." "That's a condition." "Agreed." I scrolled through the document on the screen. "Who was Ewa Kaczmarek?" "Chief accountant at Aurelia Development." "What happened to her?" "She left the company a month after the transaction." "Where does she work now?" "I don't know." "Your people couldn't find her?" "They found an address from five years ago. After that, she disappears from official professional records." "And Sowiński?" "He lives in Portugal." "Have you spoken to him?" "I tried. He didn't respond." "And my father?" This silence lasted longer. "Did you ever speak to him?" I asked. "Once." I straightened. "When?" "Eight years ago." "That was after Aurelia." "Yes." "What about?" "I asked him to meet me. I wanted to know why he had left the project." "What did he say?" "That I shouldn't ask questions about my father's decisions unless I was ready for the answers." I closed my eyes. That sounded exactly like Dad. "And what did you do?" "I was twenty-nine and convinced everyone older than me was being dramatic. So I decided he was brushing me off." "Was he?" "Today, I'm not so sure." I walked to the window. Warsaw was dark and wet. In the parking lot below, someone was trying to squeeze a car into a space half a meter too small. "Why didn't you tell me earlier that you knew my father personally?" "I said we had worked with him." "That isn't the same thing." "No." "This is exactly the kind of half-truth I don't tolerate." "I know." "No, you don't. If you knew, you would have told me immediately." I heard him breathe on the other end. "You're right." I had not expected him to admit it so quickly. "Is that everything?" "No." I waited. "Your father called me again two weeks later." My fingers tightened around the phone. "And?" "I didn't answer." "Did you call him back?" "The next day. He didn't pick up." "Did he leave a message?" "Yes." "Do you still have it?" "No." "Why?" "I changed phones a few months later. I didn't archive voicemail." I felt anger rise, absurd and powerless. "What did he say?" "One sentence." "What?" Alek's voice grew quieter. "If someone offers you a document dated March fourteenth, first check who didn't sign it." I looked at the photograph of my father's note. We have to find the March 14 agreement before Radecki does. "March fourteenth," I said. "Yes." "My father wrote down the same date." This time, Alek was the one who went silent. Finally, he asked, "Are you alone?" I frowned. "Does that matter?" "Probably not. I just wanted to know whether we could keep talking freely." "Yes. I'm alone." "Tomorrow, after the meeting with Joanna, I want to show you the original Aurelia archive." "Where?" "In our old office near the hotel." "Why isn't it digitized?" "Some of it is. Some isn't. My father had a habit of keeping important things outside the main system." "Sounds familiar." For a second, neither of us spoke. There was something strange in that silence. Not intimacy. Not yet. More a recognition that we were standing on opposite sides of the same locked cabinet, and both our fathers had taken the keys with them. "Lena," he said. My name again. This time, I noticed immediately. "Yes?" "If you want to withdraw from our other agreement, now would be a good time." I looked at the draft contract between us, open in another window. "Why are you saying that?" "Because these two matters are starting to overlap more than I expected. I don't want it to look as though I'm offering you access to your family history in exchange for pretending to be my partner." It was the most reasonable thing he could have said. And at the same time, it made my decision for me. "I'm not withdrawing." He did not answer immediately. "Are you sure?" "No." I heard a quiet laugh. "That sounds less optimistic." "But I know one thing. If I'm going to work on this transaction while finding out what connected our fathers, I'd rather stay close to the source than wait for reports." "Did you just call me a source?" "Don't get used to it." "I'll try." "One more thing." "Yes?" "I'll sign tomorrow only if we add a clause stating that no information about Aurelia can be used as pressure against me within our arrangement." "Agreed." "No negotiation?" "Some things don't need to be negotiated." He said it so calmly that for a moment I had no answer. I looked at the image of his signature beneath the email. A.R. That morning, he had been a man in a photograph attached to a transaction file. Now he knew the last message my father had ever left him. "Good night, Alek." For the first time, I used the shorter form of his name without irony. There was a brief silence on the other end. "Good night, Lena." I hung up. A few seconds later, another message arrived. An attachment. Draft agreement. Revisions incorporated. I opened the document and scrolled to the end. There were two signature lines on the final page. Aleksander Radecki. Lena Wójcik. I looked at them for a long time. Then I returned to the first paragraph. Not because I trusted him. Precisely because I didn't.