Chapter 3

Emma’s POV

By the time I left the InterContinental, the rain was coming down harder.

I didn’t take the family car. I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me straight to the Maritime Sound Archive on the east side of the city.

At ten thirty that night, the building was dark except for the faint emergency lights in the third-floor climate-controlled data center. I kicked off my cumbersome heels and ran barefoot up the cold terrazzo stairs to my private restoration room.

I swiped my card. A long beep sounded, and the access light flashed red: Permission expired.

My heart sank. I opened the internal management system on my phone and entered my employee number and security key. A cold notification appeared.

[Your administrator privileges were changed by a supervisor on October 18. Your account currently has visitor-level viewing access only.]

October 18. Three days ago.

That morning, Adrian had asked me over breakfast what kind of brooch I wanted for our anniversary.

By then, he had already stripped me of access to the archive I had built myself.

I went to the monitoring office at the end of the hallway and knocked on the archive director’s assistant’s door. “Ben, use your technician login to open Vault Three and the backend logs for me.”

I stood outside, soaked and barefoot. Ben startled when he saw me. “Ms. Bennett? What are you doing here so late? Ms. Clarke came with the company’s legal team last Friday. She said Mr. Hayes had ordered a digital migration. They copied the images of more than thirty master tapes from the nineties. They even unlocked your private encrypted drive…”

As he spoke, he nervously swiped the restoration room open.

I went to the main computer and pulled up the underlying file-transfer logs. The dense lines of code were perfectly clear. At two in the morning on October 16, the company’s cloud server had used the highest-level administrative backdoor to retrieve the lossless WAV source file for “SH-1998-0814.” Operator: Vivian Clarke. Approved by: Adrian Hayes.

Even the original reel-to-reel master I had kept in compartment four of the vault had been logged out as “Transferred to Corporate Branding, Exhibition Team.”

At eight thirty the next morning, wearing a plain black trench coat, I arrived at the Legal Department on the twenty-eighth floor of Hayes Group headquarters.

“Return my original master tape, remove every piece of promotional material containing audio from SH-1998-0814, and stop all commercial development.” I slapped the transfer logs onto the desk of Mr. Wilson, the head of Legal.

He looked uncomfortable and pushed a thick contract copy toward me. “Mrs. Hayes, we’re not trying to make this difficult. When the Maritime Sound Archive was established, the Hayes Group supplied eighty percent of its funding. There’s a catchall clause in the charter: the company has priority commercial development rights to any audio restored and digitized using archive equipment. Mr. Hayes signed this exclusive licensing agreement. It’s already in effect. We can only follow the rules.”

“That tape is my family’s private property! I paid for the treatment chemicals and the baking oven myself. I restored it on my own time!”

“But the digital transfer was completed on an archive workstation. And your husband has already provided a waiver of family rights.”

The glass office door opened. Vivian entered with a cup of coffee, closed the door behind her, and locked it.

“Mr. Wilson, go ahead and get back to work. I’d like a moment alone with Emma.”

Once he had left through the side door, the fragile innocence Vivian wore around Adrian vanished. She leaned against the edge of the desk, took a leisurely sip of coffee, and studied my pale face.

“Didn’t sleep well, Emma?” She smiled faintly. “You really didn’t need to dig through those backend logs. I told IT to change your access. And I opened the vault with Adrian’s spare executive key card.”

I stared at her coldly. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll take you to court for unauthorized entry and theft?”

“Take me to court?” She raised an eyebrow as if I’d told a joke. “On what grounds? With the authorization Adrian signed himself? You’ve been married for four years. Surely you understand him by now. Last week, we signed performance-guarantee agreements with three investment funds for The Last Tide’s derivative development. The contracts are already being carried out. If we withdraw the audio and stop the project now, Hayes will owe eighty million dollars in penalties. It will also trigger a major litigation warning before the IPO.”

She stepped closer and lowered her voice, her eyes bright with calculation and certainty. “Between eighty million dollars, his company’s IPO review, and a few seconds of your father’s old recording, which do you think Adrian will choose? He already answered that question in the lounge last night.”

My fingertips were icy, but I spoke each word clearly. “What he chooses is his business. Whether I sue you is mine.”

I turned and left, then took the elevator straight to the executive floor.

Without knocking, I pushed open Adrian’s office door.

He was listening to senior managers report on the morning’s media coverage. When he saw me, he waved them out. Then he rose from behind his desk and came toward me. His voice softened at the dark circles under my eyes. “Why didn’t you come home last night? I kept calling, but your phone was off. Did you go to the archive?”

“Adrian.” I threw the legal contract against his chest. The pages rustled against his expensive suit. “Why did you sign that asset-access request on October 16? Why did you approve Vivian’s use of my father’s belongings without saying a word to me?”

He bent to pick up the contract and set it on his desk. “Vivian brought me a bundled approval request for more than forty ocean-background recordings. She said they were for a major annual project. I was busy. I didn’t check every catalog number. I had someone look into it last night. Twenty-eight seconds of that recording were used, but all the personal final messages were removed. They kept only the waves and the routine maritime distress call at the beginning.”

He admitted it.

So casually, as if he had signed the wrong expense form.

“So?” I stared at him. “Because you cut out his last message, you’re free to use my father’s dying cries to sell tickets and attract investors?”

“What’s done is done. The promotional film has already been distributed online. I’ll have the original master returned to your vault this afternoon.” Adrian went back behind his desk. He took a black-and-gold card from a drawer, then pushed a project proposal toward me. “As compensation, this account contains five million dollars. Consider it a separate licensing payment from the company. I’ve also arranged for a permanent memorial gallery for your father on the first floor of the Bay Art Museum, opening next year. You’ll have full curatorial control.”

He watched me with a confidence I knew all too well—the certainty of a powerful man bestowing a favor.

In his mind, five million dollars and a permanent gallery were an extraordinary show of generosity and affection in exchange for a few seconds of noisy old tape.

I looked down at the card and laughed softly. There was no warmth in my eyes, only a barren, ash-gray emptiness.

“Adrian, do you think everything in this world has a price?”

I looked him in the eye and slowly pushed the proposal back across the desk.

“Keep your money and your gallery. Let Vivian use them to pad her résumé. The voice my father left behind when he died is not an asset for you to bargain with.”