The Forged License

Chapter 4 — Teresa

On Monday, Marcus watched Teresa.

He hated himself for it. This was the woman who had held Lily the day she was born, who had cried harder than anyone at the baptism. This was the woman who had sat with him at the funeral home after Samuel died and chosen the hymns because Marcus couldn’t get words out. This was blood — his mother’s sister’s daughter, the closest thing to a sister he’d ever had. But the legal pad was locked in his desk, and fourteen numbers were burned into his memory, and so on Monday, Marcus watched Teresa.

She was off from the moment she walked in. Her smile was a half-second late, like a dubbed movie. She dropped her keys twice in the parking lot — Marcus saw it through the office window. At ten, the phone rang — a supplier confirming a wire order — and she fumbled the receiver and nearly knocked her coffee across the desk, catching it with a soft cry that was too loud for the small accident.

“Teresa,” Marcus said gently from the doorway. “You okay?”

“Fine.” Too fast. “Just tired. Didn’t sleep.”

“Anything you want to talk about?”

“No.” She turned back to her computer with a finality that closed the subject like a door. “I’m fine, Marcus. Really.”

He let it go and went out to a panel upgrade in Scottsdale — a straightforward job, a 200-amp service swap for a retired couple who made him lemonade and told him about their grandkids.

The Hendersons’ garage was clean enough to eat off the floor, and Mrs. Henderson brought him lemonade in a tall glass with ice that clinked. Marcus worked methodically — disconnect, demo, new panel, torque to spec, label every circuit in his neat block letters — but his mind wasn’t on the work. It was on Teresa’s shaking hands. On fourteen photographed bid sheets.

He tested the panel twice, the way Samuel had taught him, and Mrs. Henderson watched from the doorway. “You’re very thorough,” she said.

“My father taught me that a panel is a promise,” Marcus said automatically.

Driving back to the shop, the lemonade sour in his stomach, Marcus thought about promises. He’d promised Teresa a job when she had nothing. He’d promised Jenna he’d build something honest. He’d promised his father — standing at the graveside with dirt on his shoes — that Reed Electric would mean something.

And now his cousin was selling his numbers to a thief, and Marcus didn’t know which promise was going to break first. Normal people. Honest work. Marcus sank into it like cool water, grateful for the simplicity of wire and breakers and torque specs.

When he came back at noon, the office was empty. Teresa’s purse was gone, her chair pushed back crooked, her computer asleep. On her desk, beside the invoice printer, her phone sat face-up — and the screen was lit.

Marcus told himself not to look. He was her cousin, her employer, the man who’d given her this job when she had nothing. He had no right.

He looked.

It was her photo gallery, open to the most recent images. And the most recent images were photographs of bid sheets. His bid sheets. The Copperline summary sheet, photographed at a slight angle, the edges of his handwriting visible. The Riverside office park breakdown. The Desert Ridge labor schedule. The Tolleson warehouse proposal. Photograph after photograph — a dozen of them — taken at angles that suggested a phone held quickly over a desk, catching the pages before anyone walked in.

Marcus’s mouth went dry. His ears started ringing. He swiped back through the gallery with a thumb that had gone numb, and the dates on the photos went back months. Months.

He heard the front door open.

He turned. Teresa stood in the office doorway with a sandwich bag in her hand — she’d gone out for lunch, that was all, just lunch — and her face did something complicated and terrible when she saw him standing at her desk with her phone in his hand.

“Marcus—”

“How long?” he asked quietly.

“What?”

“How long have you been photographing my bids, Teresa?” His voice was level. He was proud of how level it was, the way a man is proud of keeping his hands steady on a live panel. “Don’t lie to me. Not now.”

Her hands started shaking so hard she dropped the sandwich bag. It hit the floor with a soft thud. “I can explain—”

“Can you?” He set her phone down on the desk, screen up, the photographed bid sheets glowing between them like evidence at a trial. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks like my cousin has been selling my numbers to Dale Whitaker.”

Teresa’s face crumpled. She sank into her desk chair like her legs had given out, and she put her face in her hands, and her shoulders shook. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead. The invoice printer hummed, stupid and oblivious.

Marcus stood there holding the proof, holding fourteen stolen bids in his shaking hand, and he felt something break open in his chest that he knew would never close right again.

“Tell me,” he said. “All of it. Now.”

She lifted her head. Her eyes were red and wet, and she looked ten years older than she had that morning. “Not here,” she whispered. “Please. Not here. Not in the office.”

Marcus looked at his cousin — at the wreckage of her face — and the anger in his chest cracked enough to let something else through. Pity. Fear. Love, still, underneath it all, stubborn as a ground wire.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Lunch. The taco stand on Thomas. You tell me everything, Teresa. Everything.”

She nodded, tears spilling over. Marcus picked up her phone, closed the gallery, and set it back on her desk. Then he walked out of the office, got in his truck, and sat there for twenty minutes with his hands gripping the wheel, staring at nothing.