The elevator carried me upward in silence. I retrieved the drive from exactly where I had left it, taped under the heavy wood panel beneath my old desk. Then, rather than return through the lobby, I took a maintenance corridor that connected to the adjacent building, another property Randolph bragged about frequently and did not know my trust controlled through a layered holding structure.
On the roof, a helicopter waited.
As Philadelphia dropped beneath me, the city looked like what it really was: a chessboard of assets, histories, betrayals, labor, vanity, and the illusion of permanence.
My father was waiting in the penthouse office of his firm’s downtown headquarters when I arrived. If Randolph could have seen that office, he would have understood in one second how completely he had misjudged the world. Screens lined one wall. Acquisition files sat on the desk worth more than some small sovereign budgets. And behind that desk, in gray sweatpants, flannel, and boots, sat my father eating a greasy cheeseburger from a paper wrapper.
He looked up, smiled, and then saw my face. The smile disappeared.
Without a word, I set the encrypted drive on his desk. “This is the full trail,” I said.