Part 4
The Norfolk shipyard office at 2 a.m. looked like a stranger's building, even though I'd run half of it for six years.
Julian kept watch from the loading dock while I let myself into the archive room with the second set of keys Derek never knew existed — a precaution my father had insisted on years before he died, precisely because he never fully trusted the Shaw family either.
I found what I needed in an unmarked drawer: a folder Derek had hidden behind decommissioned manifests. Wire transfers to a company called Harrow Maritime Holdings, dating back nine years — long before Derek and I had even met.
Nine years.
I sat down on the cold floor and read it twice to be sure.
Harrow Maritime was owned by Marcus Shaw. The wires were payments — to a marine mechanic in Norfolk, dated four days before my parents' car went off the Route 17 overpass.
It hadn't been a shipyard rivalry that killed them.
It had been a hired brake failure.
And Derek had known. Not suspected — known, with documentation, kept in his own office as leverage against his father for eleven years.
I photographed every page and put the folder back exactly as I'd found it.
When I stepped outside, Julian was already tense.
"Someone's coming," he whispered. "Security truck, not scheduled."
We ran.
“My husband drove the car into the river with my brother and me trapped inside.”
