Chapter 45
Forty-Five
JACE
By the third day of the new year, I had developed a personal grievance against paper.
The whole group had been rotating through Sutter House in shifts, the dining room table buried under printouts and legal pads and laptops, the original financial architecture Dax had sent spread across every available surface and cross-referenced against Madden’s marina records and Daniel’s drug-running timeline and the property documents Layla and I had pulled before Christmas.
The work was necessary. The work was also the kind of mind-numbing that made you understand why people confessed to things just to make the questioning stop.
I’d reached the point of staring at a column of LLC registration dates with none of them meaning anything when my phone rang, Dax’s name flashing across the screen. The interruption was so welcome I answered instantly. “Tell me you have something. Anything. I’ll take a grocery list at this point.”
At the prolonged silence that followed, I momentarily wondered if someone had hacked his shit.
“Your dad is connected, man.”
My relief at recognizing Dax’s voice died a swift death as my brain processed what he’d actually said.
This was not how he operated. He habitually led with dry remarks and made you work for the substance.
The fact that he’d opened with this announcement, flat and direct, told me he’d called ahead of the email on purpose.
A warning. The kind you gave a friend before you handed them something they weren’t going to want.
I set down the page I’d been holding. “Say that again.”
“I’ve been pulling the deeper Ashmore architecture.
Took a while because it’s buried under a lot of legitimate activity, which is the point of structuring it that way.
” A pause. “Your father’s name is in it, Jace.
Not buried. Not incidental. He’s funded multiple ventures that trace back to Ashmore-connected capital. Including one tied to a Marcus Teller.”
Teller. The Bistro. Tidewater’s local face, the man Madden had surfaced through the county records. The man whose money I’d been chasing for weeks, without knowing my father’s fingerprints were on it.
“I sent you the file,” Dax said. “It’s in your secure inbox. I wanted to call first because I didn’t want you opening it cold.”
I was already moving to the laptop, pulling up the secure app, my chest doing something cold and tight that I kept off my face out of habit, even though there was no one looking at me. The file loaded. I skimmed it, hunting for the shape of what he’d said.
And there it was. John Hollingsworth, III, venture capitalist, had put money into a string of projects up and down the coast, and a meaningful number of them ran back to capital that originated in the Ashmore structure.
Teller’s ventures among them. My father’s name on the funding documents, clean and unembarrassed, exactly where you’d expect to find the name of a man who financed things for a living.
“Talk me through what this is,” I said. “Best read.”
“Best read?” Dax exhaled. “Your father funds things. That’s his whole business.
He finds capital that wants a return and ventures that need capital, and he puts them together.
If a client has money to invest and the money spends, he doesn’t run a forensic audit on where it came from.
That’s not a bug in how that business works.
That’s the business.” A beat. “So the charitable version is he’s a man who took Ashmore money and Teller money and put it to work and never asked a question he didn’t want answered.
The uncharitable version is he asked, got an answer, and put it to work anyway. ”
Not innocent. Not guilty. Adjacent.
I’d built a whole understanding of my father over the years, a clear-eyed and unsentimental one, and none of it had included this.
And yet all of it had still prepared me for exactly this.
He was a man who had institutionalized his own daughter to make a problem go away.
The idea that he’d take money without asking where it came from wasn’t a contradiction of the man I knew.
It was the most consistent thing imaginable.
“You there?” Dax asked.
“I’m here.”
“I’ll keep digging. There’s more under this. It’s going to take time to pull it clean.” His voice shifted, the warning coming back into it. “But I wanted you to have the headline. Figured that was yours to handle how you wanted.”
“I appreciate it.”
“You okay?”
“No,” I said, because it was Dax and there was no point in lying. “But I will be. Thank you.”
He hung up the way he always did, without ceremony.
I sat with the laptop for a moment and let the cold thing in my chest settle into something usable. Then I pulled up my texts.
My father’s message was still sitting there from this morning, unanswered, the way I’d been leaving his messages for two years, since he’d tried to have Willa declared incompetent in order to get his hands on her inheritance from our grandparents.
John:
Last night on the island tonight. Would be good to see you again before I go. Your father.
He signed his texts. He’d always signed his texts, as if a man needed to identify himself to his own son, like the relationship were a piece of correspondence to be filed.
I’d read it this morning and felt the familiar weight of not wanting to deal with him, set the phone down, and gone back to the records.
Now it was an opening.
It was his last night on the island. If I wanted to look my father in the eye about this—and I did, with an intensity that had arrived the moment Dax said not buried, not incidental—it was tonight or it was never, Because once he was back on the mainland, behind his assistants and his schedule, getting to him would become a project.
Tonight he was reachable, and he wanted to see me, and that wanting was a door I could walk through.
I typed back.
Jace:
Yeah. Meet you at the Bistro. 6:30?
The reply came fast enough that he’d clearly been waiting on it.
John:
Perfect. Glad you reconsidered.
I set the phone down and went to find the others.
They were scattered through the house in the various postures of people who’d been doing tedious work too long.
Madden at the dining table with her reading glasses on, Gabi and Layla on the living room floor with documents fanned out between them, Willa in the kitchen doing something with her hands because Willa processed stress by staying in motion.
Sawyer had gone to deal with a ferry thing.
Rios was at the station. Ford had run to get Peyton from a friend’s.
Daniel was back up at Nags Head meeting with his command.
The group had thinned the way it did when normal life made its demands.
“I’m going to run down a lead,” I said. “I’ll be back later.” I held up my phone. “Dax sent more. The deeper Ashmore financials. I put it in the shared folder. Start combing through it. There’s a connection to Teller worth chasing.”
Madden looked up over her glasses. “What’s the lead?”
“Let me confirm it first.” I kept my voice easy. “Don’t want to send anyone down a hole if it’s nothing.”
She held my eyes for a second longer than was comfortable, the prosecutor in her noting that I hadn’t actually answered, and then she let it go and looked back at her stack. Willa called something from the kitchen about whether I’d be back for dinner, and I told her not to wait on me.
Layla followed me to the door.
She’d clocked it. Of course she had. She read me the way I read everyone else, and she’d seen something in my face that the others hadn’t. She came to the door with me and waited until we were out of earshot of the living room before she spoke.
“What’s the lead?”
I looked at her. There was no version of this where I lied to her. “Dax found my father connected. Funding Teller’s ventures, and others that run back to Ashmore money.” I watched it land. “He’s leaving the island tonight. I’m going to have dinner with him and feel him out before he goes.”
Her eyes moved over my face, reading the rest of it, the part I hadn’t said. “You haven’t told Willa.”
“I’m not putting it in front of her until I know what it is.
It’s connections on paper. It might be nothing.
Might be exactly what Dax says, a man who funds things and doesn’t ask questions.
She already thinks he’s enough of a monster for what he did to her.
I won’t add to that over a maybe.” I paused.
“If it turns out to be more, I’ll tell her. But I want to see him first.”
Layla nodded slowly. She understood the impulse to look someone in the eye, to read the truth off them in person rather than off a page. It was what she’d built a career on.
“Be careful,” she said. “Not because I think your dad’s going to do anything. But these aren’t small people, and you’re about to start asking questions in a room you don’t control.”
“I’ll be careful.” I briefly touched her face, the kind of contact I was still getting used to being allowed. “I’ve got my phone. I’ll text you when I’m headed back.”
Koa had gotten up from his spot near the records and come to press against her leg, reading the shift in her the way he read everything. She put her hand on his head.
“Go,” she said. “Find out what he is.”
The drive into town took only about fifteen minutes. The night was chill, with few folks out and about. That suited me fine. We wouldn’t have to vie for a table, and I’d have fewer distractions from what I needed to do.
I knew Pelican Point, though it hadn’t opened until after I’d graduated high school.
It was where you went for the occasions that called for white tablecloths and a wine list that had no business existing this far from a city, the one room on Hatterwick arranged out over the water to make you feel like the kind of person who deserved it.
I’d eaten here several times over the years, most recently with Layla, across a plate of expensive fish, working Marcus Teller as a lead.
I’d known then that Teller owned the place, known he was Tidewater’s local face.
What I hadn’t known, sitting in this same room a few weeks ago, was that my own father’s money ran through the man.
There was something fitting about coming back to ask John about Teller’s money inside a restaurant Teller owned. If it registered with my father, he gave no sign. But not noticing inconvenient things was the whole architecture of the man.
He was already at the table when I arrived. Of course he was. He’d have come early to be seated first, to be the one receiving rather than arriving, a small choreography of control he probably didn’t register doing anymore.
“Jace.” He stood, and we did the thing we did that wasn’t quite a handshake and wasn’t quite anything warmer. “I didn’t think you’d take me up on it, honestly. You seemed eager to be gone the other night.”
“Layla wasn’t feeling well.” The lie was the same one I’d give about the party regardless. “And we didn’t get much chance to talk, with the crowd.”
“No, we didn’t.” He settled back, pleased, a man who believed the evening was already going his way. “I’m glad you reconsidered. I meant what I said at the party—there’s a lot worth discussing, if you’re finally in a place to discuss it.”
A server appeared. My father ordered a bottle of something I didn’t pay attention to, waving away my non-participation with the ease of a man accustomed to ordering for the table, and I let him, because letting him run the small things would make him comfortable, and comfortable was what I needed.
“So,” he said, when the server had gone.
“How much longer do they have you out here? Whatever it is you’ve been doing for six weeks.
” He said it lightly, but the question underneath it was the same one he’d been asking since the party—whether I was between things, whether I was reachable, whether the Navy still had a claim on me he’d have to work around. “You’ve been vague about it.”
“It’s been a quiet posting.” I gave him nothing. “How long are you on the island?”
“Flying out in the morning.” He turned his glass by the stem.
“Which is why I wanted tonight. We didn’t get to anything real at the party, and I don’t like leaving things half-finished.
” A pause, the pivot coming. “Edmund’s doing some genuinely interesting work down here.
I think you’d find it worth your time, if you were ever inclined to look past the uniform. ”
“How is it you know Edmund Ashmore?” I asked it easy, conversational, the way you ask anything over the first glass of wine, and I watched my father’s face for the thing that would tell me whether the question landed anywhere it shouldn’t.
He answered without a flicker. “Edmund? We’ve been moving in the same circles for years now.
You don’t get far in coastal development without crossing paths with the Ashmores eventually.
” He smiled. “Sharp man. Old money, but not lazy about it, which is rarer than you’d think.
He’s got vision and the kind of holdings most people would just sit on.
But he’s always developing, always looking at the next thing.
Pity you didn’t get a chance to meet him the other night.
” He set the glass down. “Why the interest?”
“Curiosity. It’s been a while since I knew anything about your life.”
And there it was, the opening I’d handed him, the door swung wide. My father leaned into it, into the version of this dinner where his estranged son was finally circling back toward the orbit he’d been bred for, and he started to talk.
I let him.