Before Dawn Betrays Us - By Morning, She Will Choose Between His Trust and Loyalty to Her Family ebook

Cover

Before Dawn Betrays Us

By Morning, She Will Choose Between His Trust and Loyalty to Her Family.

Laura Bellini

ROMANS

Table of contents

Title page

INTRO

Chapter 1 - The Man with Conditions

Chapter 2 - What Isn’t in the Paperwork

Chapter 3 - The Woman Who Remembered Too Much

Chapter 4 - The Boundary You Can’t See

Chapter 5 - Key Number Seven

Chapter 6 - After Hours

Chapter 7 - What Remained in the Drawer

Chapter 8 - Before the Lights Go Out

Chapter 9 - The Second Key

Chapter 10 - The Price of Other People’s Debts

Chapter 11 - The Price of Honesty

Chapter 12 - What Really Belongs to the Family

Chapter 13 - Twelve Percent

Chapter 14 - Not Everything We Inherit

Chapter 15 - Emergency Committee

Chapter 16 - On the Other Side

Chapter 17 - The Terms We Write Ourselves

Chapter 18 - The Full Version of the Truth

Chapter 19 - The Price of Closure

Chapter 20 - On This Side of Dawn

Landmarks

Cover

Title page

Table of contents

Start of content

INTRO

At four thirty-seven in the morning, the hotel sounded as though it were breathing through clenched teeth.

The wind battered the old windows on the forest side, water shifted somewhere in the pipes, and the emergency lights in the corridor cast too little light for anything to look innocent. I stood barefoot in my father’s office with my phone in one hand and a key in the other. It was small, brass, with a worn number seven stamped into it. An hour earlier, it had been in the pocket of Michał Zaremba’s jacket.

Now I had it.

The last message from my brother glowed on the screen.

You have until dawn. Find out what’s in there. If Zaremba has a copy, we need to know before the meeting.

I didn’t reply. Not because I didn’t know what to write.

I knew all too well.

I’m not doing it.

That sentence would have been enough to choose a side. The problem was that in all thirty-three years of my life, the word side had almost always meant the same thing as family.

The Sawickis were difficult, proud, loud, and exceptionally gifted at pretending a crisis was merely a more demanding version of dinner. But they were mine. The Hotel by Lake Ciche was ours too, although for months the bank, our creditors, and half the local gossip network had held opinions of their own on the matter.

And Michał?

Michał was the man I had promised, three hours earlier, that I wouldn’t hide anything else from him.

I closed my eyes.

It was an exceptionally inconvenient memory.

We had been sitting in the empty hotel restaurant at a single table lit by a candle because the storm had knocked out the power across the entire building. He had cut his hand helping me secure a cracked window in the orangery. I was holding the bandage, and he was watching me with that infuriating calm of his that appeared exactly when I wanted him to lose it.

“Emilia,” he’d said. “If I’m staying until morning, I need to know whether you’re still playing fair with me at all.”

“I’m not playing.”

“Good. That’s the worst possible answer.”

I laughed then, even though I shouldn’t have.

A moment later, his fingers tightened lightly around my wrist, not to stop me, only to see whether I would pull my hand away.

I didn’t.

When he kissed me, he did it only after my quiet yes, and for a few minutes I became someone who didn’t have a family business to save, documents to review, or a surname that had been opening some doors for generations and locking others twice over.

Now I was standing in front of one of those locks literally.

The brass key fit the narrow drawer in my father’s desk.

I knew because earlier that evening I had seen Michał slide a navy folder into it while he thought I was talking to the receptionist by the stairs. He hadn’t explained.

I hadn’t asked.

At the time, I could still tell myself it was ordinary documentation for tomorrow’s meeting with the bank.

Then Adam called.

My older brother didn’t waste time on introductions.

“He found something,” he said.

“Who?”

“Don’t make me look like an idiot, Emi. Zaremba. Dad remembers that folder.”

“Dad’s been claiming for two days that he can’t remember where he put his own phone.”

“That doesn’t mean he can’t remember something from eighteen years ago.”

That was the first moment I truly felt cold.

Eighteen years.

Exactly that long ago, the Zaremba family had sold the Sawickis the final share of the land beneath the hotel’s northern wing. At home, the transaction had always been reduced to a single sentence:

Fair. Closed. Settled long ago.

Michał had arrived five days earlier as the representative of a fund considering taking over part of our debt. Only later did I learn that his mother had once been Anna Milewska-Zaremba, and that the signature on that old agreement belonged to her.

Coincidence.

That was what my father had said.

I hadn’t believed him.

I hadn’t told Michał that I didn’t believe him.

And that was exactly how everything I had promised three hours earlier never to do again had begun.

I turned my phone face down.

Outside the window, the night had begun to pale. It wasn’t dawn yet, but the black sky above the tree line had already taken on a dark blue cast.

I had maybe an hour.

Maybe less.

I slid the key into the lock.

I didn’t turn it.

A floorboard creaked behind me.

I turned so quickly that my hip struck the edge of the desk.

Michał stood in the doorway.

He was wearing a dark sweater, the same one I had given him after the storm because his shirt had been soaked through by the rain. His hair was still slightly damp, and his bandaged hand rested against the doorframe.

He didn’t look sleepy.

His gaze moved first to me.

Then to the key.

I didn’t try to hide my hand.

It was probably the only honest thing I was capable of at that moment.

“Couldn’t sleep?” I asked.

“I could. Then I noticed you were gone.”

His voice was quiet.

It hurt more than anger would have.

“Michał…”

“That’s my key.”

“I know.”

“How did you get it?”

I could have lied.

I had practice, if withholding half the truth and leaving someone with the version most convenient for the family counted as lying.

This time, though, every sentence that came to mind sounded like something I would never want to hear from him.

I held out my hand and placed the key on the desk.

“It fell out of your jacket in the restaurant,” I said. “I found it later.”

“And you brought it here.”

“Yes.”

“At four thirty-seven in the morning.”

“Yes.”

For a moment, the only thing we could hear was the wind.

Michał stepped into the office, but stopped on the far side of the desk.

He didn’t come any closer.

Only a few hours earlier, I had known the warmth of his mouth and the way he asked with his eyes before touching me.

Now a meter of old oak lay between us, along with a brass key and everything we had failed to tell each other before.

“Did you open it?” he asked.

I looked at the drawer.

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

That was worse.

“Yes.”

He didn’t flinch, but something in his gaze changed.

It didn’t grow colder.

It grew more attentive.

“Why?”

My phone vibrated on the desk.

We both looked at the screen.

ADAM.

He didn’t need to see the message.

The name was enough.

Michał looked back at me.

“Did your family send you here?”

Dawn still had no color, but it was already there in the windows, a thin line beyond the black forest.

I thought about my father sleeping one floor above us. About Adam waiting for an answer. About the hotel’s debt. About the employees who didn’t know whether they would still have jobs a month from now.

And then I thought about the man standing across from me, who had come here with reasons of his own, a history of his own, and a document my family was clearly afraid of.

He had a right to the truth.

They were my family.

My phone vibrated again.

Michał didn’t push me.

He didn’t demand an explanation.

He simply waited.

And that was what made me understand, for the first time, how much trust could cost when someone gave it to you at the exact moment it would be easiest to take advantage of it.

I looked at the key.

Then at him.

“They didn’t send me,” I said. “But they expect me to choose them.”

“And you?”

Outside the window, the night began to give way.

I knew that before it was fully light, I would have to answer.

Chapter 1 - The Man with Conditions

Five days earlier.

By nine seventeen on Monday morning, I already knew three things about Michał Zaremba.

First, he was exactly seventeen minutes late and made no attempt to blame traffic, the weather, or his navigation system. Second, when he walked into the lobby, he noticed the crack in the marble floor before he noticed the sign beside reception advertising our autumn wellness package. Third, he was far too calm for a man who had come to decide whether my family’s hotel would get the money it needed to survive the winter.

I didn’t like people who stayed calm in a crisis.

It usually meant the crisis wasn’t theirs.

I was standing at the high table beside reception, finishing a call with our bread supplier, when the revolving door stalled for a moment under the force of the wind. Michał stepped inside with a dark bag slung over one shoulder and a thin coat that looked far too elegant for November in Warmia.

He wasn’t the kind of man you described as handsome in the first sentence.

That word was too simple.

He had the kind of face you wanted to watch during a conversation just to see when it would finally betray an emotion.

I ended the call and checked my watch.

“Mr. Zaremba?”

“Michał is fine.”

“Emilia Sawicka. Seventeen minutes.”

He glanced at his own watch.

“I know.”

“That’s all?”

“If you’d like, I can invent a dramatic story about a truck blocking the road.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“That’s why I didn’t.”

My first instinct was almost to smile, but I decided a man arriving on behalf of an investment fund hadn’t yet earned that kind of help from me.

“The conference room is on the first floor. My brother is already waiting.”

“And you?”

“Me too.”

“I asked whether you were waiting.”

His gaze rested on me a second too long. There was no flirtation in it. That would have been easier. He looked as though he genuinely wanted to know whether I intended to attend the meeting as the hostess or as someone who actually had a say in what happened.

“I’ve been running the hotel’s operations for three years,” I said. “If the question is whether I’ll be present at every meeting concerning its future, then yes.”

“Good.”

“Why is that good?”

“Because according to the documents, most of the changes that improved the operating result began after you took over management.”

This time, I was the one who studied him a little longer.

Asterion had received more than four hundred pages of data from us: reports, contracts, forecasts, cost schedules, occupancy rates, food and beverage revenues, event revenues. Most people read material like that to find an argument for lowering a valuation.

Michał had apparently also read it to establish who was actually doing the work.

“So you did prepare for the meeting.”

“I even prepared for being seventeen minutes late. That was the one thing I couldn’t defend.”

I pointed toward the stairs.

“Then try defending the financing terms.”

Adam and my father were waiting upstairs. Adam sat at the table with his laptop open in front of him and a cup of coffee he wasn’t drinking. My father stood at the window, although for the past several months, after being on his feet for any length of time, he had started unconsciously shifting his weight onto his left side.

I pretended not to notice because he pretended nothing was wrong.

In our family, symmetry in lying had a long tradition.

“Mr. Zaremba,” Adam said, getting to his feet.

My father turned only a moment later.

The change in his face was slight. If I hadn’t known him for thirty-three years, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it. His lips parted a little, then his jaw tightened.

“Zaremba?” he repeated.

Michał stopped beside the table.

“Yes. Michał Zaremba.”

My father looked at me, then at Adam.

“No one told me the surname.”

“It was in the emails,” Adam said.

“I don’t read every signature block.”

“I do,” Michał said calmly. “Sometimes that’s where the most important information is.”

My father didn’t answer.

It lasted maybe four seconds, but four seconds in a negotiation was long enough for everyone at the table to notice that something had happened.

I sat beside my father.

“Let’s begin.”

For the first forty minutes, Michał behaved exactly the way I expected a man representing a fund to behave. He asked precise questions, didn’t interrupt the answers, and took very few notes, but always at the right moments. He wanted to know why conference revenue had risen by nineteen percent while the restaurant margin had barely moved. He wanted to know why the northern wing still required almost two million złoty in additional capital expenditure when my father had begun the renovation four years earlier with a budget half that size. He asked about the repayment schedule on our bank debt and our expected energy costs after the current supplier contract expired.

I answered most of the questions.

Adam stepped in whenever financing came up.

My father mostly listened.

He was the worst part of it.

Not because he made mistakes.

Quite the opposite.

He was controlling himself so carefully that it had become obvious.

“Asterion is proposing to refinance part of the bank debt and provide an additional facility to complete the northern wing,” Michał said. “Six million eight hundred thousand złoty in total.”

Adam straightened.

“What security?”

Michał slid a printout toward him.

“A second-ranking mortgage, a pledge over the shares in the operating company, and a package of control rights in the event of covenant breaches.”

“How extensive a package?”

“The fund wants the right to acquire thirty percent of the shares if the contractual conditions aren’t met for two consecutive quarters.”

I gave a quiet snort.

“So if things get worse, you take a piece of the hotel.”

“If things deteriorate below the point at which the fund can reasonably expect to recover its money.”

“Nice sentence.”

“Unfortunately, the meaning stays the same.”

“And if we don’t agree to the equity option?”

“Then Asterion probably won’t enter the transaction.”

My father pushed the paper back.

“There are other investors.”

“There are,” Michał agreed. “Two have turned you down in the last six weeks.”

Silence fell.

I looked at Adam.

He hadn’t told me about the second one.

I knew about the first rejection. A regional bank had backed out after the collateral valuation was updated.

I had heard nothing about another.

“Who?” I asked.

Adam didn’t even look at me.

“Emi, not now.”

“Exactly now.”

“We’re talking about Asterion.”

“We’re talking about what alternatives we have.”

My father sighed.

“Emilia.”

One word.

The same tone he had used throughout my childhood to tell me family matters would be discussed later.

Later was the place inconvenient things went to, and from which they returned with remarkable infrequency.

Michał closed his folder.

“I can give you ten minutes.”

“No need,” I said.

Adam shot me a warning look.

“There is.”

I left first.

The upstairs corridor led into the glass connector between the main building and the northern wing. In November, the lake was the color of old silver and the reeds along the shore bent under the wind. Usually the view calmed me.

That day it only reminded me how much I had to lose.

I heard footsteps behind me.

“I don’t need a witness to a family argument,” I said without turning around.

“I came for water.”

I looked over my shoulder.

Michał was holding an empty glass.

“The dispenser is the other way.”

“Then I came for badly located water.”

“Do you always answer like that?”

“When someone immediately assumes the worst version of my intentions, it saves me time.”

I rested my hands on the windowsill.

“You knew about the second rejection.”

“Yes.”

“From whom?”

“I can’t disclose information I received from a third party.”

“So you know more about the situation of my hotel than I do.”

“That isn’t a question for me.”

I disliked people being right in ways that gave me nowhere convenient to put my anger.

“Don’t turn this into family psychology.”

“I’m not. I’m only saying that someone at your table decided you didn’t need the full picture.”

I turned toward him.

“And you intend to use that picture in the negotiations.”

“Of course.”

“At least you don’t pretend.”

“Pretending complicates due diligence considerably.”

“And people?”

For the first time, he smiled.

Briefly, as though he hadn’t planned the gesture.

“People complicate themselves.”

A cloud shadow moved across the glass roof. Michał looked toward the northern wing, where sections of scaffolding still covered the exterior elevation. Some of the rooms had been closed since February, when we discovered the ventilation system needed far more extensive reconstruction than we had assumed.

“I want to see it,” he said.

“The rooms?”

“The whole wing. The boiler room, the technical back areas, the northern parcel, and the old outbuilding.”

“Why the outbuilding?”

“It’s on the security map.”

“It’s empty.”

“Then it should be easy to inspect.”

I watched him for a moment.

“When?”

“Now.”

“Your shoes cost about two thousand złoty.”

He looked down.

“That’s an impressively precise estimate.”

“My friend runs a boutique. I had to learn the difference between expensive decisions and genuinely expensive mistakes.”

“And which category do my shoes fall into?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll see after the mud.”

Half an hour later, I knew a fourth thing about Michał Zaremba.

He wasn’t afraid of getting his shoes dirty.

We walked through the part of the hotel still under renovation, where the air smelled of plaster and fresh wood. I showed him the new service risers, the rooms waiting for finishing work, and the corner suite that would have the best view of the lake once we opened.

He asked about costs, deadlines, and contractors, but he didn’t pretend to be an engineer. When he didn’t know something, he said so.

That was irritating too.

It was much easier to dislike a man who tried too hard to impress you.

Outside, the air was sharp. We headed toward the northern boundary of the property. The grass, wet from the night’s rain, flattened beneath our shoes, and between the trees we could see the roof of the old storage building, built before the hotel had been expanded.

“Does the company property end here?” Michał asked.

“Another thirty meters. The boundary runs along the drainage ditch.”

“Wasn’t it once closer to the building?”

I stopped.

“What makes you think that?”

He pointed toward a line of old apple trees.

“The trees are arranged in a way that’s typical of an old parcel boundary. Pines on one side. Orchard on this one.”

“You know a lot about orchards?”

“No.”

“Property boundaries?”

“A little.”

He walked up to one of the trees. The trunk was old and split, partly covered in moss.

“This land was added to the hotel later than the rest, wasn’t it?”

A faint tension gathered between my shoulder blades.

“Eighteen years ago.”

“Two thousand eight.”

He didn’t ask.

He stated it.

“Yes.”

He looked toward the lake.

“Who owned it before?”

For a second, I wondered whether that question had been answered in the documents the fund received from us.

It should have been.

The history of the land register wasn’t secret.

“A woman named Anna Milewska-Zaremba.”

He didn’t turn.

“My mother.”

The wind sent a darker wave across the grass.

The sentence was so simple that for a moment I didn’t know what to do with it.

“Your mother sold us this land?”

“Yes.”

“You knew before you came here?”

Now he looked at me.

“Yes.”

I remembered my father’s reaction.

“And Asterion?”

“They know there’s a family connection. I disclosed it before I joined the project.”

“And they didn’t consider it a conflict of interest?”

“They did. That’s why my role is limited. I don’t make the final investment decision.”

“But you’re conducting the analysis.”

“Yes.”

“That’s convenient.”

“For whom?”

I didn’t answer.

Michał slipped his hands into the pockets of his coat.

“If you want to suggest I came here for some kind of family revenge, say it directly. It’ll be easier to answer.”

“I don’t know why you came.”

“The fund pays me to determine whether this hotel is a good investment.”

“And privately?”

For the first time that morning, he didn’t answer immediately.

He looked toward the old storage building.

“Privately, I’d like to know why my mother has refused to talk about this land for eighteen years.”

Before I could respond, my phone rang in my pocket.

Adam.

“Where are you?” he said as soon as I answered.

“On the northern parcel.”

“With him?”

“Yes.”

A brief silence on the other end.

“Come back. Dad wants to finish the meeting before lunch.”

“Why?”

“He’s not feeling well.”

I looked toward the hotel.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. Just come back.”

He hung up.

Michał was watching my face.

“Everything okay?”

“My father wants to end the meeting.”

I started back toward the building, but after a few steps I realized Michał wasn’t following.

He was standing beside a rusted boundary post partly hidden in the grass. He bent and pushed aside the wet leaves with his shoe.

“Emilia.”

It was the first time he had said my name without any formality.

I took two steps back.

Someone had scratched two sets of initials into the little metal plate fixed to the post a long time ago.

J.S.

A.M.

Beneath them was a date, barely visible.

2008.

“Someone using this as a romantic meeting spot?” I asked, though I knew immediately the joke was weak.

Michał didn’t answer.

He touched the edge of the plate as if checking whether it was really there.

“My mother’s name is Anna,” he said.

“My father’s Jan.”

This time we looked at each other at the same moment.

For the first time that day, I wasn’t thinking about the financing terms.

Chapter 2 - What Isn’t in the Paperwork

My father insisted that the initials on the boundary marker meant nothing.

He said it too quickly.

We were sitting in his ground-floor office half an hour after returning from the parcel. Michał had stayed in the restaurant with Adam, who had suddenly decided it was the perfect moment to discuss the details of the repayment schedule. I had taken my father into his office under the pretense of checking his blood pressure.

The monitor sat untouched on the desk.

“J.S. and A.M.,” I repeated. “Two thousand eight. On the boundary of the land we bought from Anna Milewska-Zaremba.”

My father was going through some invoices, although I was certain he had been staring at the same page for several minutes.

“Workers marked all kinds of things.”

“The workers knew the owners’ initials?”

“Emilia, it was eighteen years ago.”

“I know. Michał knows too.”

The invoice froze in his hand.

“Michał.”

“That’s his name.”

“Don’t get familiar with him.”

I gave a short laugh.

“We walked around a muddy field together. We’re not engaged.”

My father looked at me sharply.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Why are you reacting to him as though he came here to take back something that belongs to him?”

I had hit the mark.

I didn’t need an admission.

I knew my father.

Over the years, he had taught me how to negotiate with suppliers, how to read a profit-and-loss statement, and never to sign a contract the other party couldn’t explain in their own words.

He had also taught me that people said the most when they were trying very hard to stay silent.

He put the papers down.

“The Zarembas were paid for the land.”

“I didn’t ask about the money.”

“That was what the transaction was about.”

“Michał says his mother refuses to talk about the sale.”

“That’s her business.”

“Your reaction this morning suggested otherwise.”

My father stood. He took two steps toward the window and stopped with one hand resting on the back of an armchair.

That gesture was enough to remind me that three months earlier he had ended up in the hospital with an arrhythmia, and that the doctor had used the word stress so many times even Adam had stopped rolling his eyes.

“Sit down,” I said.

“I’m fine.”

“In our family, that sentence should be on the coat of arms.”

He looked at me, then actually sat.

I picked up the blood pressure monitor.

“Don’t turn me into a patient.”

“I won’t if you stop behaving like a man who’s about to faint with dignity.”

He held out his arm.

The cuff tightened around it. For a moment, the only sound in the room was the quiet hum of the machine.

“I don’t like the fact the fund sent him,” he said.

“He disclosed the conflict.”

“He should have recused himself.”

“He doesn’t make the investment decision.”

“He has influence.”

“Anyone who comes here has influence. We need the money.”

My father looked away.

The reading was too high.

I wrote it down on a piece of paper.

“Will you tell me what happened in two thousand eight?”

“We bought the parcel.”

“I know that already.”

“Then there’s nothing to discuss.”

I removed the cuff.

“There is if something exists that might come out during legal due diligence.”

“Everything is in the registers.”

“Everything?”

He looked at me.

“Yes.”

The lie had a familiar shape.

It wasn’t an outright falsehood. It was more like an answer to a question slightly different from the one I had asked.

Everything entered in the registers could indeed be in the registers.

That didn’t mean nothing else existed.

“Fine,” I said.

My father frowned.

“Fine?”

“If everything’s in the paperwork, you won’t mind if I review the archive from the 2008 transaction.”

He said nothing.

“Emilia…”

“I need to know what I’m walking into when I talk to the fund.”

“Adam has the documents.”

“Then I’ll ask Adam.”

I stood.

“Leave it alone.”

I stopped at the door.

He didn’t raise his voice.

He didn’t need to.

“Why?”

“Because we have more important problems.”

“A problem that makes my father tell me not to read our own documentation automatically qualifies as important.”

“Don’t involve yourself in things from years ago.”

“The hotel is mortgaged under loans secured against property purchased then. This isn’t the past. It’s security for our future.”

He turned his face toward the window.

“You always have to know everything.”

I don’t know why that sentence hurt more than it should have.

Maybe because for most of my life I had heard the opposite.

That I should care more about the company.

Be more responsible.

Be more present.

After university, when I stayed in Gdańsk and ran a hotel belonging to an international chain, my father kept telling me that “someone else’s business” would never be the same as your own.

Then, when I came back six years later and began trying to rescue the family hotel from the consequences of his overambitious expansion, it suddenly turned out there were parts of our own business that somehow weren’t mine.

“No,” I said. “I just don’t want to be the last person to find out.”

I left.

Adam found me twenty minutes later in the storage room behind reception, where I was checking a delivery of new electronic locks for the guest rooms. I was doing it myself even though we had a maintenance employee, because I needed something to occupy my hands.

“Dad says you interrogated him.”

“Dad has a flair for drama.”

“You have a flair for pushing at the worst possible moment.”

“I asked about the parcel.”

“I know.”

I put the box down.

“Did you know who Michał’s mother was?”

Adam rubbed the back of his neck.

The answer arrived before he spoke.

“You knew.”

“I found out a week ago.”

“And you didn’t tell me.”

“There was no point causing a panic.”

“Interesting. Because I’m beginning to realize that apparently everyone in this building has access to information except the person responsible for keeping it running day to day.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

“Which investor turned us down second?”

His face hardened.

“That’s not related.”

“It is to me.”

“Verto.”

I knew the name. A private debt fund from Poznań. We had spoken to them before Asterion.

“When?”

“Last week.”

“Why did they decline?”

“Too much risk.”

“What kind?”

“Financial.”

“Adam.”

“Emi, stop.”

I moved closer.

“No. I’ve been responsible for the results for three years. I let two administrative staff go when we didn’t have the money. I convinced the kitchen to change its entire operating model. I stood in front of thirty employees and told them their salaries would be paid on time even though I wasn’t sure myself. If you’re hiding something now, don’t tell me to stop.”

For a moment, he looked as though he wanted to fight with me.

Then he lowered his eyes.

“Verto had a problem with the acquisition history of the northern parcel.”

The storage room went very quiet.

“What problem?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“You don’t know, or you won’t tell me?”

“All we got was a short note saying the historical documentation required additional analysis and that, given our current debt level, they didn’t want to take it any further.”

“And you decided I didn’t need to know that?”

“I decided that if we could close Asterion, there was no point giving you another problem.”

“Another problem.”

“Yes.”

“In my hotel.”

“Ours.”

“Then act as though it’s ours, not yours and Dad’s.”

The storage-room door opened.

Natalia from reception pulled her head back the moment she saw our faces.

“Sorry. I didn’t realize…”

“Everything’s fine,” I said automatically.

The biggest family disasters should always be handled discreetly, especially around staff.

“Ms. Emilia, Mr. Zaremba is asking if he can have access to the technical archive.”

Adam swore under his breath.

“What archive?”

“Maps, permits, old plans,” Natalia said.

I looked at my brother.

“Of course he can.”

“Emilia.”

“What? Everything’s in the paperwork.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t use Dad’s words against me.”

“I haven’t even started.”

I walked past Natalia and out into the corridor.

Michał was waiting in the lobby by the fireplace. He had taken off his coat and was speaking on the phone with his back to me.

I wasn’t deliberately eavesdropping, but I heard the final sentence.

“No, I don’t have confirmation yet. If I find it, I’ll call.”

He ended the call and turned.

“Confirmation of what?” I asked.

I hadn’t startled him.

“Something that could affect the transaction.”

“Very precise.”

“One of the occupational defects of lawyers.”

“You’re a lawyer?”

“I was. Now I work in restructurings and special situations.”

“So you’re a lawyer who learned to call something a ‘special situation’ when it’s particularly unpleasant.”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

“More or less.”

“Verto pulled out because they had doubts about the northern parcel.”

This time, his expression really changed.

Not much.

Enough.

“How do you know that?”

“I just found out.”

“From your brother?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He walked over to a low table and set down his phone.

“Because if your brother knew earlier, he should have disclosed that information to Asterion.”

“Maybe he did.”

“He didn’t.”

A flare of anger went through me, although I was no longer sure who it was directed at.

“And did you know?”

“I knew Verto had analyzed the case. I didn’t know why they declined.”

“But you’re specifically interested in documentation from that period.”

“I’m interested in everything related to the collateral.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I said it without raising my voice.

For a moment, he looked at me as though deciding whether I deserved an answer beyond the formal one.

“You shouldn’t.”

I hadn’t expected that.

“What?”

“You shouldn’t trust me just because the fund sent me here with a business card and a document checklist. I also have a private reason for being interested in that parcel.”

“Your mother.”

“Yes.”

“What does she know?”

“It’s complicated.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“For now, it’s the only one I can give you without speaking for her.”

That boundary stopped me.

He could have hidden behind confidentiality, conflict procedures, or internal policy.

Instead, he had said he wouldn’t tell his mother’s story without her consent.

“What are you looking for?”

“A document.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t know.”

I laughed in disbelief.

“You’re looking for a document and you don’t know what it is?”

“I know what it concerned. I don’t know what form it took.”

“That sounds even worse.”

“Probably.”

I sat in the armchair opposite him.

“Try from the beginning.”

He hesitated.

“When I was nineteen, my mother told me selling the land had been necessary. She never claimed anyone had cheated her. She never said she regretted the sale itself either.”

“But?”

“Whenever I asked about the Sawicki hotel, she ended the conversation.”

“Maybe she simply didn’t like my father.”

“That’s possible.”

“You think otherwise.”

“Two years ago, we were clearing out her old house. I found an envelope with documents in it. There was a copy of the parcel subdivision map and a sheet of paper with a handwritten note.”

“What note?”

Michał looked at me carefully.

“‘After the loan is repaid, in accordance with the arrangements with J.S.’”

For a moment, I forgot to breathe.

“That was all?”

“And a date. November 2008.”

“What did your mother say?”

“That I should throw the papers away.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

Of course he hadn’t.

“And now you’ve come here as the fund’s representative.”

“I didn’t plan it. Asterion got the project through a broker. When I saw the company name and the address, I disclosed the conflict.”

“But you agreed to come.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

This time, he didn’t look away.

“Because if the fund is going to invest almost seven million złoty, the truth about the property will come out anyway. I preferred to be here when it did.”

The sentence stayed with me.

Not because it sounded threatening.

Because it made sense.

“I want to see that map,” I said.

“I don’t have it here.”

“A photo?”

“I do.”

“Will you show me?”

“Not today.”

Anger came instantly.

“Wonderful. So you’re going to decide what I’m allowed to know too.”

“No. It’s a copy of my mother’s private document. First I want to compare it with your archive. If it turns out to be material to the transaction, it will enter the formal process.”

“Very convenient.”

“Not convenient. Careful.”

“The distinction depends on who’s holding the document.”

Michał accepted that without argument.

“That’s true.”

After lunch, we went down to the archive together.

It was in the basement beneath the older part of the hotel, beyond the wine storage room my father stubbornly called “the collection,” even though most of the bottles were simply too expensive for anyone to have the courage to open.

The archive smelled of paper, dust, and cold air. Metal shelving ran in two narrow rows. Documents from before digitization sat in gray boxes labeled in Mrs. Teresa’s handwriting. Our former accountant had spent thirty years being able to locate an invoice faster than a computer.

“Two thousand eight is at the back,” I said.

Michał took off his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and began moving boxes.

“I see you took the threat to your shoes seriously.”

“Now I’m worried about the shirt.”

“Progress.”

We worked side by side for almost an hour.

There was nothing romantic about it. Dust got up my nose, the corners of the boxes were falling apart, and the dry air made my hair begin a rebellion of its own.

Even so, I noticed that Michał didn’t roll his eyes when we had to go through the same binders for the third time. He didn’t throw papers around. He read the labels. He asked before moving things.

Competence could be dangerously attractive.

“I’ve got the survey maps,” he said.

I walked over.

He spread three sheets across the table. The oldest showed the land before the expansion. The second, dated June 2008, showed the proposed subdivision of the parcel belonging to Anna Milewska-Zaremba. The third was later, after the transaction had been completed.

I traced a red line with one finger.

“These are the old apple trees.”

“Yes.”

Michał took out his phone.

“Can I take a picture?”

“If I get a copy.”

He looked at me.

“Deal.”

He took the photograph.

Along the bottom edge of the map was a handwritten note partly obscured by the surveyor’s stamp.

“Option B - lakeside section to be settled separately.”

I frowned.

“What does that mean?”

Michał leaned closer.

Our shoulders touched for a second.

I pulled back instinctively, more from surprise than discomfort.

He did the same.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s fine.”

I looked at the map again.

“‘Settled separately.’”

“There’s no such division on the later plan.”

“So?”