“So you stopped helping my husband.”
“Yes.”
Julian looked wounded in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
Not angry.
Disappointed.
Mercer seemed to notice.
“I told myself I was protecting the students.”
“Were you?”
“No.”
The simple answer landed harder than a defense would have.
“I protected the program because I was afraid of losing it. I never knew equipment was being deliberately substituted. I thought the accounting problems were administrative.”
Maya glanced down at her wheelchair.
“And when chairs started breaking?”
“I didn’t connect it.”
“Why not?”
Mercer looked at her.
“Because adults are sometimes very good at explaining away the thing directly in front of them.”
Maya considered that.
“That’s a terrible skill.”
“Yes,” Mercer said. “It is.”
There was no villainous confession.
No hidden mastermind.
Only a man admitting that fear had made him look away.
In some ways, that was harder to hear.
The records gave police enough to begin a formal financial investigation.
