Chapter 10 - The Files of the Forgotten
Desk three was little more than a scarred wooden table squeezed between a noisy radiator and a towering shelf of legal digests. Madison sat down on the hard metal folding chair, uncapped the red pen, and opened the first manila folder.
The name on the tab read Miller, Thomas – Bakery & Café.
As Madison flipped through the pages of bank statements, eviction notices, and corporate correspondence, a cold realization settled in her stomach. The shell company that had illegally seized Mr. Miller's bakery lease wasn't some distant, faceless conglomerate; it was Vance Holdings LLC—the exact parent company her father managed, funded by the money used to buy her first luxury sports car.
She stared at the photocopied signatures at the bottom of the eviction notice. Her father’s signature was scrawled in bold, arrogant ink, right above a clause that deliberately exploited a legal loophole to bypass the bakery's grace period.
"Heavy reading?" a gentle voice asked.
Madison looked up to see a middle-aged man standing by her desk, holding a paper cup of steaming coffee. It was Thomas Miller, the baker himself, his hands flour-dusted and calloused, his eyes carrying the heavy exhaustion of a man who had lost his life's work.
"I'm sorry," Madison blurted out before she could stop herself.
Thomas blinked, surprised by the raw, unfiltered remorse in the young woman's voice. He pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down, resting his worn leather cap on the corner of the table. "You're Arthur Vance's daughter, aren't you? I saw you on the news livestream yesterday."
Madison shrank back into her metal chair, bracing herself for the shouting match, the insults, or the demand that she leave. She kept her eyes fixed on the red pen in her hand. "Yes. I am."
"My wife and I built that bakery over twenty-five years, working sixteen-hour days," Thomas said quietly, his voice remarkably devoid of malice. "When the eviction notice came, we had to sell our daughter's college fund just to pay off the immediate storage fees for our ovens."
"My father... he didn't care about the people behind the numbers," Madison whispered, a tear escaping and splashing onto the manila folder. "I didn't care either. I thought money just appeared in accounts because we deserved it."
Thomas looked at her for a long moment, studying the lack of designer makeup, the unstyled hair, and the genuine grief etched into her face. He reached across the table and gently tapped the corner of the file.
May you like
"Well, Madison," the baker said softly, offering a faint, tired smile. "The first step to fixing a broken ledger is admitting the math is wrong. Are we going to help me get my ovens back, or are we just going to sit here crying over old ink?"
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