I arranged to meet Maya Sharma at a discreet café far from Kincaid Global’s towering headquarters. She was younger than I expected, with keen, intelligent eyes that missed nothing.
“Thank you for meeting me, Ms. Kincaid,” she began, sipping her herbal tea. “This isn’t just about a profile piece anymore.”
I carefully pulled out a redacted copy of Beatrice’s letter, omitting the parts that painted my mother as naive, framing it instead as my mother’s growing unease with Arthur’s ruthlessness.
“My mother, Beatrice, was very idealistic,” I explained, pushing the pages across the table. “She wrote this when the company was just starting. She was worried about my father’s initial… ‘unethical maneuvers’ to keep Kincaid Global afloat.”
Maya read quickly, her brow furrowing. “Covert land deals, intimidating local competitors… This isn’t just ‘unethical,’ Ms. Kincaid. This is corporate strong-arming, possibly illegal. And ‘Croft’? That name sounds familiar. Our sources sometimes whisper about a ‘fixer’ in Kincaid Global’s early days.”
She looked up, her gaze piercing. “This isn’t damage control for a gala incident, is it? This goes back to the very beginning. Your father didn’t just stumble into success. He built an empire on questionable foundations.”
I nodded, my throat tight. Maya was connecting the dots, seeing a pattern of shadowy practices. She understood the historical corruption, the “underworld” aspects, but she still saw Arthur as the purely ruthless villain, the one who betrayed my mother’s idealism.
She hadn’t yet grasped the full, horrifying twist: that my mother’s own missteps might have forced Arthur’s hand, that the “Croft” in the letter was Silas’s predecessor, tying the past directly to the present, and that the “underworld” was a solution, not just a preference. She saw a villain. I now saw a man driven by a desperate, morally bankrupt pragmatism, and a company built on a web of secrets far more intricate than simple greed.
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