Page 71 of Inevitable Secrets

Henry was silent the entire time, creeping forward slowly to the back of the gated facility. He turned, following a rusted-out sign that signaled him to continue further inward, where he finally stopped outside a garage-type, roll-up door with the number 81 painted on it.

“Stay here,” Henry said, taking his gun out and getting out of the vehicle. He went over to the door and punched numbers into another keypad, and then pulled up the rolling door enough to crouch into the space. After about a minute he came back and opened the car door.

“I don’t want to attract too much attention,” he said, “so we will have to crawl through the space like it is.” Taylor and Derrick followed him out and all crouched inside the space. Henry used his phone to provide a sliver of light, closed the door behind them, and then searched the walls and found a switch. Taylor was certain it wouldn’t do anything, but after it was flicked up the fluorescent hum sounded and the space illuminated.

“Ho-ly fuck,” Derrick said as Taylor blinked her eyes to adjust to the lights.

She gasped as she took in the space. The entire storage unit was filled from floor to ceiling, just packed with furniture. And Taylor recognized the pieces before her from Preston Manor. Her eyes went wide as she scanned over the relics. So this was what he had for her—old furniture, the furniture he took out of her home as he had destroyed it in his craze?

Fury flashed through Taylor like a flame shooting up and out. “Goddammit!” she shouted, kicking and shoving the large antique pieces before her. She grabbed a glass tray on top of one of the pieces before her and slammed it against the wall, shattering it into countless pieces.

She was stopped as arms wrapped around her from behind. “Tay, Tay, relax,” Derrick tried to soothe, but Taylor kicked out her legs and sent the bureau before her rocking and then crashing to the ground joining the remnants of the glass tray.

Derrick spun Taylor in his arms. “Taylor!” he shouted and finally Taylor stilled, but then she just fell forward into her husband and wept.

She cried, moaned, and sobbed into her husband’s chest. It was the definition of an ugly cry. “I, I just, I…” she tried to hiccup out.

“Shhhh,” Derrick soothed, rubbing her back.

“I just want answers,” she bawled out. “Even from the grave he is torturing me.”

“We will find answers, Taylor, I promise you.”

Behind them Henry cleared his throat. “Taylor, Derrick,” he called and they turned to find him crouched down among the pieces of the furniture on the floor.

And plucking notebooks from the carnage.

Twenty-One

Taylor satin her office the next day and clicked through the financial files that had been sent to her. She hadn’t wanted to come in today. She had wanted to stay in that storage container all night and find every book in there, but Henry had convinced her otherwise.

“Taylor, let me get this place cleared out,” Henry had argued the night before. “If I can get everything out of here, and back to the mansion, you will be able to go through all of it.”

“We can do it now,” she had argued back, “we can—”

“Tay, it is packed in so tight, there is no way we can get to everything without taking it out and we can’t do that now,” Derrick had reasoned.

Reluctantly, Taylor had known they were right. So here she sat, focused on the thing she had been trying to get to all week—looking into Cedric’s finances.

The financial situation during Cedric’s tenure as CEO was like watching a thermometer reading drop when placed into ice. The decline started about two years before Taylor came back and continued at a rapid rate. Taylor marveled at it, wondered how and why divisions were not closed. How had they even been able to function at this capacity?

There was a knock at Taylor’s door and she called out a welcome, only to regret it when Todd entered. She had been pretty adeptly avoiding him since the day she returned, but she had known it was only a matter of time.

Taylor sat silently at her desk as Todd came and stood behind the chairs across from her.

“Can we talk?” he asked.

Taylor waved a hand at the chairs, as she didn’t trust herself to open her mouth. Her patience meter was low.

Todd took a seat and focused his attention on his fingers. “I want to apologize for the other day,” he said.

“Huh?” It was the only thing she was able to get out that resembled a word. Of all the things she expected him to be coming in here for, this was not it.

Todd sat up and looked at Taylor. “I was wrong for coming on like a crazy man when you returned the other day. I was a jerk,” he held up his hands before Taylor could say anything, “and I know that is my baseline but you should not have been on the receiving end of it.”

Taylor looked at Todd, and as much as she wanted to keep him in the time-out corner, she knew this apologizing stuff was probably hard for him. “I surprised a lot of people, I get it. Apology accepted,” she said.

Todd sat back and nodded, glanced around the room and then back to Taylor. “Your Dad would have loved seeing you running this place,” he said finally.

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