Hunting Leo

I stepped out of the steam and into a house that was now nothing more than a crime scene. I didn't look at the bed where my husband slept with the peacefulness of a man who hadn't just robbed his own children. I moved to the attic, my bare feet silent on the stairs, until I reached the boxes of paper archives the family had tried to bury under a decade of dust.

To find the Cayman keys, I had to find Leo.

Leo was the phantom limb of the Hayes family, the older brother Julian never mentioned and Eleanor pretended didn't exist. He had been a partner at Sterling & Vance until he vanished overnight ten years ago, leaving behind a wake of whispers about "unreconcilable differences." In the Hayes dictionary, that usually meant he’d found the rot and refused to paint over it.

I pulled down a stack of tax returns from 2016, my hands trembling as I flipped through the schedules. The family had been meticulous in scrubbing him from the firm's recent history, but they couldn't erase the legacy of his departures. I wasn't looking for a current address; I was looking for the debris.

I found it buried in a defunct LLC filing—*North Shore Restoration Group*. It was a shell company Arthur had dissolved the year Leo disappeared. I scanned the fine print, my vision narrowing until I hit the alternate contact line. It was an old ProtonMail address, one that didn't follow the family's standard naming convention.

*[email protected].*

I sat on a trunk, the heat of the attic pressing in on me. Julian always claimed Leo was the unstable one, the brother who couldn't handle the "weight" of the family legacy. But looking at the 529 statements in my mind, I realized Leo hadn't been unstable. He’d been a witness.

I pulled out my phone, the light from the screen glaring in the dark attic. I needed more than just a name; I needed the map to the offshore portals Marcus couldn't crack. I needed the man who knew where Arthur hid the ghosts.

I opened a new message, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm. I knew Eleanor's surveillance didn't reach this deep into the past, but the risk felt like a physical weight. If Arthur found out I was reaching for the exile, the custody threat would become a reality before I could finish the first sentence.

I didn't overthink it. I couldn't. I typed the truth, the only currency I had left in a world built on forgeries.

She typed a single subject line: 'Arthur is hiding it again.' And hit send.