Hidden Assets

The letter arrived on a Tuesday.

Cameron Ashford-Bright read it twice, folded it with the precise, controlled movements of a woman who had not yet decided whether to cry or commit a felony, and placed it flat on her kitchen counter next to her untouched coffee. Then she picked it up and read it a third time, because surely - surely - she had misread it.

She had not misread it.

Dear Ms. Ashford-Bright, it is with deep regret that Pennington & Associates must inform you that your position as Senior Auditor has been made redundant effective immediately. Given the sensitive nature of recent events, the partners have agreed that a clean separation serves all parties best. Your final cheque and personal effects will be couriered to your residence. We wish you every success in your future endeavours.

Recent events.

Cameron set the letter down again. She picked up her coffee. She put it back down. She walked to her window and looked out at the grey, indifferent city morning and thought about recent events with the kind of cold, surgical focus that had made her one of the best auditors at Pennington & Associates for six consecutive years.

Recent events were, specifically, her sister.

Her sister and Edmund Holt, Senior Partner, whose wife was the founder’s daughter, whose marriage was the load-bearing wall of the entire firm’s social architecture, and who had apparently decided - with the catastrophic judgement of a man who believed himself both invincible and invisible - that Talon Ashford-Bright was worth burning everything down for.

He had been wrong.

Edmund still had his job. His wife had forgiven him with the grim efficiency of a woman protecting an inheritance. And Cameron, who had done nothing - nothing - except share a surname and a date of birth with the most spectacularly irresponsible woman alive, had been quietly removed like a conflict of interest.

She picked up her phone and called Talon.

Talon answered on the fourth ring, which meant she was either asleep or applying eyeliner. Possibly both.

“Before you say anything,” Talon said, “I want you to know I feel terrible.”

“Do you.”

“Genuinely. Awful. I’ve barely slept.”

“You answered on the fourth ring.”

A pause. “I was doing my eyeliner.”

Cameron closed her eyes. She had the power to reach directly into the human mind and rearrange its contents like furniture — she could make a person forget their own name, convince a man he was deeply afraid of staplers, or implant a compulsive need to apologise. She had never once used this gift on her sisters, for reasons that were becoming increasingly difficult to remember.

“They fired me, Talon.”

“I know. Edmund told me. He felt dreadful about it apparently.”

“Edmund,” Cameron said, very quietly, “can feel dreadful from the unemployment line, because I am going to dismantle his career with my bare hands and the contents of the last quarterly audit, which I completed and which contains seventeen discrepancies that I was prepared to overlook out of professional courtesy.”

“...Oh.”

“Where is Sheron?”

Another pause, longer this time. “That’s actually - there’s a thing with Sheron.”

The thing with Sheron became apparent forty minutes later when Cameron arrived at her youngest sister’s apartment - younger by four minutes, a fact Sheron had never once used as ammunition because Sheron didn’t have ammunition. Sheron had feelings and good intentions and an absolute inability to keep either to herself.

Sheron Ashford-Bright was sitting on her kitchen floor surrounded by what appeared to be every nail polish colour known to humanity, a box of tissues, and a handwritten letter that had clearly been cried on.

She was also, Cameron noticed, still wearing her nail technician’s apron, which meant she had come home in it, which meant whatever had happened had happened fast.

“They let me go,” Sheron said, looking up with red-rimmed eyes and the expression of a golden retriever that had been told Christmas was cancelled.

Cameron sat down across from her on the kitchen floor, because sometimes the floor was simply where conversations happened. “Tell me.”

“Mrs. Okonkwo came in for a full set.” Sheron twisted the apron string in her fingers. “And we were talking - you know how we talk, she’s lovely, she always asks about you both - and she mentioned that her husband had been looking at some investment properties and was worried about the tax implications and I just - I know about tax implications, Cameron. I have a degree. I was trying to help.”

“What did you tell her?”

Sheron’s face did something complicated. “I may have told her that based on current property acquisition trends and the capital gains projections I’d seen in my premonitions-”

“You told a client about your premonitions.”

“I told her I had a feeling. I was very vague.”

“And?”

“And she moved her entire pension into a property development in Guadalajara that I had an extremely clear vision about, and it turns out the vision was correct but I had misread the timeline by approximately eighteen months, and the development won’t yield returns until - ”

“Sheron.”

“She lost forty thousand.”

Cameron pressed two fingers to her temple. Talon, who had arrived behind her and was leaning against the doorframe eating a mango with the casual energy of someone watching a film she had already seen, made a sympathetic noise that was not entirely convincing.

“It was an honest mistake,” Sheron said, with tremendous sincerity. “The vision was accurate. The timing was just-”

“The timing,” Cameron said, “is the entire point of financial advice.”

Sheron looked at the nail polishes. “I also did her a lovely French tip. She said it was the best she’d ever had.”

“She still reported you?”

“She was very nice about it. She said she liked me personally.”

Cameron stood up from the floor with the measured movements of a woman recalibrating. She looked at Talon. Talon looked back with the expression of someone who knew they were partially responsible for the general shape of this week but had made peace with it.

“I’ve lost my job,” Cameron said, “because of you. Sheron has lost her job because of herself, which is somehow both better and worse. I have seventeen discrepancies in a Pennington audit that I could weaponise but doing so would be professionally catastrophic. We have collectively-” she checked her mental accounting “-enough savings to survive approximately four months before things become genuinely unpleasant.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Talon said, finishing her mango, “that we need a holiday.”

“We cannot afford a holiday.”

“A free holiday.” Talon produced her phone with the smooth confidence of a woman who always had something up her sleeve, mostly because her sleeves were usually not long enough to conceal anything, which made it more impressive. “I called Uncle Magnus.”

A silence settled over the kitchen floor with considerable weight.

“Magnus,” Cameron repeated.

“He has a resort. In the Amazon. It’s technically free because he’s family.”

“He won’t want us there.”

“He said, and I’m quoting directly-” Talon looked at her phone “-‘absolutely not, the three of you are a natural disaster in human form and the last time you visited I had to re-tile the east wing.’”

Sheron brightened slightly. “That wasn’t entirely our fault. The thing with the fountain-”

“He said no,” Cameron said.

Talon smiled. It was the particular smile she deployed when the outcome was already decided and the conversation was simply catching up. “He said no initially. Then I talked to him for another twenty minutes.”

Cameron stared at her. “What did you do to him?”

“I talked to him. With my voice. Like a normal person.” The smile remained perfectly calibrated. “I may have reminded him that we know about the Amazon operation, and that Cameron specifically knows what an irregular tax structure looks like, and that we are family who love him very much and would never dream of mentioning any of this to anyone.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“That’s family communication.”

Sheron had gotten up from the floor and was already looking at her phone with rekindled energy. “I’ve never been to the Amazon. I had a vision about it once - lots of green, a man on a horse, someone crying, but mostly lovely.” She paused. “There was also something exploding but I think that might have been a different vision.”

Cameron looked at the letter on the counter. She looked at her sister, who had just cheerfully described what sounded like a premonition of genuine disaster and categorised it as mostly lovely. She looked at Talon, who had blackmailed their uncle into hosting them with the serene confidence of someone who saw absolutely nothing wrong with this.

She thought about Edmund Holt, sitting in her office, behind her desk, with his comfortable marriage and his intact career, and the seventeen discrepancies that existed on a hard drive in her bag.

“Fine,” Cameron said. “We go to Magnus.”

Talon’s smile became something warmer, more genuine. “Pack for heat. And something nice for evenings - the resort has a bar apparently.”

“Of course it has a bar.”

“Magnus built it himself. According to him it’s the finest bar in the entire Amazon basin, which isn’t saying much, but still.”

Sheron was already heading toward her bedroom with the accelerated energy of someone who had been sad for an hour and had now fully processed it. “Should I bring my premonition journal? I’ve been getting a lot of very specific ones lately. There’s a man - very handsome, very confused looking - and I keep seeing him around a lot of horses.”

Talon and Cameron looked at each other over Sheron’s head.

“Pack the journal,” Talon said.

Two days later, Magnus Shadrach stood on the veranda of the Hidden Assets Resort, watched a small plane descend through the Amazon canopy with the resignation of a man who had lived eight hundred years and somehow still hadn’t learned to let uncomfortable phone calls go to voicemail.