The room was cold enough that she could see her breath when she sat down.
Delia placed the folder on the table in front of her and kept her hands on it. The ledger sat beside it, the same volume she'd held across her knees two days ago. The contract her father had drawn up lay on the other side of the table, ready for her signature.
The door opened. Her father came through first, filling the frame the way he filled every room he entered. Patrick Rourke had built his fortune on knowing when to speak and when to let silence do the work for him, but he had never been a quiet man. His coat was new wool, expensive, cut in the American style that marked him as trade money the moment he stepped into an Irish drawing room.
Behind him came Edmund Ryan, the solicitor. He was spare and neat, his face arranged into the professional neutrality of a man who had overseen a great many transactions and had no opinion about any of them.
Patrick crossed to the table and sat. Ryan followed, setting his case down with the careful precision of someone who handled documents for a living.
"You're early," Patrick said, as though the fact itself were interesting and he had not yet decided what to do with it.
"I am."
"Gave yourself time to look over the books, did you?"
She met his eyes. "I did."
He nodded once, the gesture of a man who had expected exactly that and was not displeased by it. Then he pushed the contract across the table toward her.
"Ryan's gone through it twice. Clean as they come. Sign where it's marked, and we'll have this done before dinner."
Delia looked down at the paper. It was a marriage settlement, the terms laid out in Ryan's precise hand. Her name appeared three times: once at the top, once in the clause that transferred her father's capital into the estate's accounts, and once at the bottom, where a space had been left for her signature.
She picked up the folder in front of her and set it on top of the contract.
Patrick's gaze sharpened. Across the table, Ryan's hands stilled over his case.
"I'll sign it," Delia said. "This one first."
Her father leaned back in his chair. He did not ask why. He waited.
She opened the folder and drew out a single sheet. The terms were written in her own hand, each line clear and spare, the way she had learned to draft them at his desk in Boston when she was nineteen and he'd handed her the first set of contractor accounts that did not add up.
"Read this before I sign yours."
She turned the paper so he could read it. He did, his eyes moving down the page without haste.
"Power of attorney," Patrick said.
"Yes."
"Over the estate. The accounts, the agent, the leases, the rents." He looked up. "Everything that's his, you want control of."
"I do."
Ryan leaned forward, his expression unchanged. "Miss Rourke. A power of attorney is not a term of marriage. It is a separate instrument. It grants you authority that supersedes your husband's in all matters pertaining to the management of his property."
"I know what it is."
"Then you understand it is—" He paused, choosing his words with the care of a man walking a line he had walked before. "—unusual."
"It's necessary."
Patrick's hand came down flat on the table. Not a blow, just a sound to pull the room's attention back to him.
"Explain necessary."
She had been ready for this. She had known he would ask, and she had prepared the answer the same way she prepared every answer she gave him: stripped down to the bones, nothing he could pick apart.
"Your capital pays down the mortgages in stages. Mr. Croft has been appointed receiver. He returns in a matter of weeks to inspect the books and accept the first payment. If those books are not in order when he arrives, the estate passes into receivership regardless of how much money you've put into it." Her voice stayed level. "The estate is not dying because of the boycott. It is being robbed. And I cannot prove that if I have no access to the records."
Ryan's gaze moved to her father. Patrick said nothing.
"Mr. Ryan," Delia said. "Is the construction I've outlined legally sound?"
The solicitor hesitated. Then he inclined his head.
"It is."
"And given that the receivership has already been opened, and the payment schedule your office negotiated is conditional on the estate remaining solvent through the term of repayment—given all of that—is there another way to ensure the books are brought into order before Mr. Croft's arrival?"
Ryan looked at her for a long moment. She knew what he was weighing. Not the law. The law was clear. He was weighing whether to say aloud what they all knew: that without someone standing over the agent's shoulder, those books would never be clean.
"No," he said quietly. "There is not."
Patrick's chair scraped back. He stood and walked to the window, his hands behind his back. For a moment the only sound in the room was the faint creak of the floorboards under his weight.
Then he turned, and there was something in his face she had not seen before. It was not approval. It was recognition. The look of a man who has just realized he is sitting across the table from someone who knows what cards he holds.
It passed. He smiled, the broad easy smile he used when he closed a deal, and waved a hand at the paper on the table.
"She's got you pinned, Ryan. Witness it."
Ryan opened his case.
Delia looked past her father to the man who had not yet spoken.
Fintan stood at the far end of the table. He had been there the whole time, so still she might have missed him if she had not known to look. His coat was the same one he had worn two days ago, good cloth worn past its prime, and he stood as though someone had threaded a steel rod down the length of his spine.
His eyes were on the paper in front of her.
"Mr. Merrick," she said.
He did not look up.
"If you sign this, you will retain title to the estate. But the management of it passes to me. The accounts, the agent, the tenants—all of it. You will have no authority to countermand my decisions in those matters."
"Do you understand that?"
That brought his gaze up. For a moment she saw something flicker behind the careful blankness of his face. Not anger. Something colder.
"Miss Rourke." His voice was quiet and very even. "I have only weeks before Ambrose Croft returns to take an accounting of this estate and everything in it. If the books are not in order when he does, I lose Ardglass regardless of your father's money. You have made it clear that you believe someone is stealing from me. I do not know if that is true. But I know I am out of time to find out." He reached for the pen Ryan held out to him. "So yes. I understand."
Ryan slid both papers down the table to him, her sheet and beside it the contract Patrick had brought, and Fintan signed them one after the other, the pen not leaving his hand between.
He set the pen down and stepped back, as though he'd touched something that hadn't finished burning.
Ryan drew them back across the table. Delia signed the same way, just as quickly — her name on the contract beneath his, and on her own sheet his beneath hers. Patrick added his own under the clause that bound his money to it, then pushed the pages toward the center of the table, done.
Then she looked up at her father.
"The estate is being robbed," she said. "Not by the Land League. Not by the boycott. By someone inside it."
Patrick's brows rose. "You have a name?"
"Not yet."
"Then what do you have?"
She tapped the ledger beside her folder. "Enough to know it's happening. Enough to know it has been happening for years."
Ryan cleared his throat. "Miss Rourke, if you intend to make a formal accusation—"
"I don't." She kept her eyes on her father. "Not until I can prove it."
Patrick studied her. Then he grinned, sudden and sharp, as though he'd just seen a gap in a competitor's bid and knew exactly how to drive through it.
"Well then," he said. "I suppose you'd better get to work."
He stood, clapped Ryan on the shoulder, and walked out.
Ryan gathered his papers in silence. The door closed. The room was still.
Delia folded the signed document and slipped it back into her folder. Fintan stood at the far end of the table. He was looking at the place where his signature sat beneath hers, black ink on white paper, his name under her terms.
His expression remained blank. The full meaning was still settling between them.
He had given her his house. She had told him someone was stealing it. And the name of the thief was still locked behind a column of figures she could read but not yet prove.
Fintan turned and walked to the door. He stopped with his hand on the frame, his back to her.
"Was that mercy or conquest, Miss Rourke?"
She had no answer for him.
He left without waiting for one.
Delia sat alone at the table, the folder in her hands and the cold pressing in from every side. The question hung in the air between them, unanswered. She had won the house.
And neither of them knew yet whether she had saved him or taken him prisoner.