Two days later, I met with an attorney of my own.
Her name was Nora Fielding.
She had been recommended by Ruth's neighbor, who worked with intellectual-property disputes.
Nora didn't promise to recover a fortune.
She asked me to explain how the drawings were made.
She wanted dates.
She wanted contracts.
She wanted to know whether I had given permission orally, even once.
“Daniel often said he'd like to put my drawings on cards,” I told her.
“Did you ever agree to a particular company using them?”
“No.”
“Did you receive regular statements?”
“No.”
“Did you know Blue Lantern Paper existed?”
“No.”
She wrote down each answer.
Then she spoke about copyright ownership, licensing, agency, and the limits of relying on a signature without examining the surrounding records.
I found the law less comforting than I'd hoped.
Some rights could be established from dated originals and other evidence.
Some had to be examined design by design.
The time that had passed could complicate claims and remedies.
And Daniel's death made reconstructing intent harder.
“Can Emily be held responsible?” I asked.
“Possibly, depending on what she knew and when.”
“Could this become criminal?”
“That would require evidence and the appropriate authorities. Right now our job is to preserve records, establish facts, and protect your interests.”
I nodded.
I didn't want a dramatic announcement.
I wanted the truth written in a form no one could explain away.
Nora arranged a meeting with Anne Keller and a forensic accountant named Samuel Ortiz.
Samuel had a small office full of labeled boxes.
He offered me a chair beside a printer that sounded as though it needed repairing.
“I hope you don't mind noise,” he said.
“I've been living with a great deal of it in my head.”
He gave me a sympathetic look without asking for a story.
The company's ledger was extensive.
There were invoices from paper suppliers.
Licensing arrangements with distributors.
Payments to illustrators who had actually signed agreements.
Refunds for damaged shipments.
Payroll records from a part-time warehouse employee.
It was a real business.
That made Daniel's decision harder to comprehend.
He hadn't taken an anonymous drawing and sold one illegal print.
He had built a system around pretending I'd agreed.
Samuel explained that total sales were not total profit.
Printers and retailers took substantial portions.
A high revenue number could hide a modest margin.
Emily's contributions also mattered to the accounting.
She had negotiated suppliers and handled customer complaints.
Her work was not imaginary.
Neither was mine.
Samuel highlighted one column.
“These transfers went from the business to Mr. Mercer's personal account.”
There were payments across multiple years.
Some were recorded as partner distributions.
Some as reimbursements.
Others lacked adequate descriptions.
I recognized one amount.
It matched the deposit on a car Daniel bought nine years earlier.
He told me his employer had paid him a performance bonus.
I could remember celebrating with takeaway pizza.
I could remember saying he deserved something nice.
I stared at the entry until the numbers blurred.
“Could the deposit have come from another account?” I asked.
“Yes,” Samuel said. “We can't establish an exact connection from matching amounts alone.”
“Then we check.”
“We check.”
The next folder contained email records.
One message was from Emily to Daniel four years earlier.
Claire should be told. We need written confirmation from her, not another assurance from you.
His reply came an hour later.
Don't drag her into business problems when she's finally happy again.
I read those words slowly.
That year I had started taking evening art classes.
Daniel attended the end-of-term exhibition.
He bought me flowers.
Emily came too.
They posed beside me for photographs.
I had been happy.
Not because I was ignorant of a business problem.
Because I believed I was free to decide what to do with my own work.
Then Samuel showed me an older email.
Daniel had forwarded one of my original sketches to a printing company.
The subject line read: Approved artwork from C. Mercer.
Attached was a scan of my signature.
It looked similar to the licensing agreement.
“Can we determine where that scan originated?” I asked.
“Perhaps. We would need the source file or device records, if available.”
I thought of the study at home.
Daniel had kept an old scanner beneath his desk.
I hadn't touched it since the funeral.
Samuel advised me not to alter devices until an appropriate copy could be made.
That afternoon I went home and put a label on the study door.
Not because the room was evidence in a courtroom yet.
Because I wanted to stop myself from searching through it alone and accidentally changing something useful.
I sat in the hallway for a long time.
Then I called Ruth.
“I found out Daniel used company money for things he told me he'd earned somewhere else.”
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Do you want me there?”
“Not tonight.”
“Okay.”
She didn't ask me to explain.
That kindness made me cry after we hung up.
I went into the kitchen and made soup.
For seventeen years, Daniel had said the secret to good soup was adding salt before the vegetables softened.
I had always argued with him.
That night I made it exactly my way.
It tasted fine.
I also asked Samuel to explain his work in ordinary language.
He took out a blank sheet and drew three columns.
Income.
Cost.
Transfers.
“This is only a starting point,” he said.
I appreciated that he didn't make the numbers appear simpler than they were.
He walked me through one year.
There were sales to bookstores and independent shops.
There were returns when seasonal cards failed to sell.
There were printing bills, packaging costs, and shipping fees.
There were small advertising expenses.
Then there were payments to the company owners.
Some had clear authorization.
Some did not.
“What happens when documents are missing?”
“We seek independent records where possible. Bank statements, invoices, correspondence, tax returns.”
“And when none survive?”
“Then we identify the uncertainty rather than inventing precision.”
That phrase stayed with me.
Identify the uncertainty.
For months after Daniel died, people had tried to reassure me with confident statements.
He was proud of you.
He never wanted to leave you.
He knew you loved him.
They might have been right.
But they could not know every thought in his mind.
I had accepted their certainty because uncertainty frightened me.
Now I was learning that an honest unknown could be easier to live with than a beautiful invention.
After the meeting, I went to a café near Samuel's office.
I took the spreadsheet with me.
A young waiter asked whether I needed another coffee.
I ordered tea instead.
I studied the date of one distribution.
It fell on the same weekend Daniel and I had gone away for our fifteenth anniversary.
We'd stayed in a small country hotel.
He bought flowers for the room.
He paid for an expensive dinner.
I remembered worrying about the cost.
He told me he'd saved for months.
I could not prove that particular dinner came from the business.
The dates were only a coincidence until more evidence established otherwise.
Still, I remembered how relieved I'd been when he told me not to worry.
I went home and wrote down the memory.
I labeled it Personal recollection, not financial proof.
It felt strange to divide my own life into those categories.
But for now, keeping them separate helped me breathe.
Click here to continue reading: PART 7: Emily’s Letter Explained the First Lie and Why She Kept Choosing Daniel’s Comfort Over Mine
The Last Photograph Emily Asked Me to Take Beside the Water Before She Told Me About Daniel
Part 6 of 16
