The Quiet Room
What the Yard Kept

Harborlight

August 25, 2026 · Part 6 of 10 · 2 min

Harborlight Wealth Partners managed retirement accounts for something like eleven hundred clients, most of them well past seventy, the kind of clients who trusted a firm with a fountain out front and a partner who remembered their grandchildren's names.

The forensic accountants took four days to find what Corinne had apparently found in an afternoon.

"Skimming," the lead investigator told Bright, with Callum sitting in because Bright had started letting him, maybe out of guilt, maybe because he'd earned it with a shovel. "Small percentages off client statements, rounded numbers moved into a shell account. Individually invisible. Over six years, across eleven hundred accounts—"

"How much," Callum said.

"Just north of four million."

Roland's name was on the filings. So was another name Callum hadn't heard before: Grady Pruitt, listed as a managing partner, the one who'd handled the firm's back-end transfers.

"He's not answering," Bright's colleague said, hanging up a phone. "Third time today."

Bright frowned at her notes. "Pruitt's assistant says he canceled every meeting on his calendar this week. Personal emergency, no details."

"Convenient," Callum said.

"Or scared," Bright said. "A four-million-dollar hole doesn't stay quiet once one partner gets arrested for murder. If Pruitt knows what's in those spreadsheets, he knows exactly how much rope he's standing on."

Roland himself was already in custody — arrested two days earlier, after soil under his fingernails matched the rose bed and a neighbor's doorbell camera placed his car in the driveway at 2 a.m. the night Corinne's phone stopped moving from its charging dock. He hadn't confessed. He hadn't said much of anything, according to Bright, except one line his lawyer couldn't stop him from saying in the first interview: "She was going to ruin everything I built."

Everything he'd built. As if Corinne, and the ground she was found in, were line items too.

Callum drove home that night thinking about Grady Pruitt, a name on a filing, a man who'd gone quiet the exact week his partner got arrested for burying evidence with a body.

He didn't know yet that Pruitt hadn't run.

Pruitt had gone to ground even closer than that — close enough to walk the same yard, if he waited for the right night.

Continue the story Part 7: The Box →

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