29. Killian
KILLIAN
I’m standing at my desk waiting on the final guest list for the midsummer event. Harper’s running it as lead event director and Sophia’s debuting her flagship store inside it, which still does something to my chest every time I think about it directly.
My daughter used to be a headline. Three years ago I had a standing arrangement with two different PR firms and a lawyer who kept my private number saved under a code name.
There was a stretch where I couldn’t open a newspaper at breakfast without bracing first, scanning the page before I let myself actually read it, because there was always a real chance her name would be on it attached to some version of events that had nothing to do with what actually happened.
Now she’s a business owner with a P&L she actually reads, asking smart questions in meetings, pushing back on vendors who try to overcharge her because she’s young and pretty and they assume she won’t notice.
She notices everything.
It feels like yesterday I had her in the crook of one arm at the hospital, asleep, smaller than anything I’d ever held.
By that same afternoon, years later, I was on the phone with lawyers trying to keep her name off three different front pages before she’d even had breakfast. Somewhere between those two memories she became this.
Capable. Sharp. Completely unwilling to let anyone tell her what she couldn’t do.
Harper’s had as much to do with where Sophia is now as I have.
The boutique was Sophia’s idea but Harper’s the one who took it from an idea to a floor plan, a budget, a launch date that’s actually going to happen.
She color-coded the entire vendor timeline without being asked to, caught a contractor trying to double-bill the lighting installation before it ever reached my desk, talked Sophia down from three separate panic spirals in a single week without once making her feel small for having them.
But the refusal to accept a limit just because someone handed it to her, the stubbornness that’s kept her standing through every version of herself the tabloids tried to write, that’s never belonged to anyone but Sophia.
Proud doesn’t cover it. There isn’t a word that does.
I find myself thinking, more often than I’d admit to anyone but myself, about what it would have meant to have someone like Harper in Sophia’s corner ten years ago, back when the headlines were at their worst and Evelyn was more interested in managing optics than managing her daughter’s actual wellbeing.
Harper showed up to a job and ended up rebuilding something neither of us knew needed rebuilding.
I don’t know how to thank a person for that properly. I’m not sure the gesture exists.
My inbox pings. Marcus, Mallory’s assistant, with the final reservation list. I open it expecting nothing complicated.
Most of it’s exactly what Harper and Mallory already confirmed.
Confirmed guests, vendor headcounts, the handful of personal invites that came through Sophia and through me, board members who always show up for the photos, regional press who always show up for the wine.
I scroll through it on autopilot, the way I scroll through most of what crosses my desk this time of year, half my attention still on the conversation I need to have with Beaumont about his vote before the week’s out.
It’s all going fine until it isn’t.
Jason and Rebecca Miller.
Harper’s parents.
I read the names twice, certain I’m misreading something, and the second read confirms the first. My first instinct, the old one, the one that’s kept this estate running for two decades, is damage control.
Who’s seen this list. How fast can it be quietly amended before anyone else notices.
But underneath that, faster than I can suppress it, is something closer to fear, the kind I haven’t let myself feel since the divorce, the kind that comes from realizing someone I love is about to be ambushed and I’m three steps behind whoever set the trap.
There’s no version of Harper that invites the two people who tanked her career in New York to the single most important professional moment of her summer without telling someone first. Without telling me.
She’d have walked into my office and laid it out clearly, weighed the risks, asked what I thought, because that’s who she is. Methodical even when she’s panicking.
Which means she didn’t invite them.
Which means someone else did, and there’s exactly one person on this estate petty enough to do it without asking, but first I need to call Mallory.
She picks up on the second ring, distracted, mid-conversation with someone in the background about color schemes, and the someone is Harper, and hearing her voice does the thing it does, the thing I’ve stopped pretending isn’t happening every single time.
“Killian, hi, sorry, one second.” Mallory’s voice moves away from the phone. “Harper, can you check the linen samples while I take this?”
Harper’s reply is too far away to make out, just the shape of her voice without the words, light and easy, the version of her that exists when she’s deep in work she’s good at.
Mallory comes back. “Sorry. What do you need?”
“Can you step away for a minute?”
A pause, then footsteps, a door closing somewhere. “Okay, I’m away. What’s going on?”
“The Miller reservation. Jason and Rebecca. Can you pull it up?”
“Um, yeah, give me a second.” Typing. “Okay, I’ve got a Jason and Rebecca Miller, confirmed RSVP, checked in for arrival the Friday before the event. Is that a problem?”
“How did they hear about it?”
“The form has a field for that. It says they came through a personal invite code.” More typing. A pause. “Evelyn’s code.”
There it is.
“Is there a problem?” Mallory asks again, and I can hear the part of her brain that’s already running through whether she missed something on her end. “Should I flag it for Harper to look at?”
“No.” My voice comes out flatter than I mean it to. “I’ll handle it myself. Don’t mention it to her yet.”
“Okay. You’re the boss.”
“Thanks, Mallory.”
I hang up and sit with it for a moment before I do anything else, because once I pull this thread there’s no putting it back the way it was, and some part of me already knows exactly how far it’s going to unravel.
I pull up the admin log for the events portal anyway, because I want to see exactly how deep this goes before I decide what to do about it.
Evelyn’s login history shows three sessions over the past six weeks, each one timed within minutes of a phone call logged on her vineyard line.
Six weeks. Six weeks ago Harper was still learning the names of half the vendor team.
Six weeks ago I hadn’t even told Evelyn the festival had a confirmed date, which means she went looking for it herself, which means this isn’t opportunistic.
It was planned, patient, exactly the kind of long game she’s always preferred over anything that might actually require her to be present for the consequences.
I cross-reference the numbers against the file Maddox built when he flew to New York and went digging into the Millers, and they match exactly. Same area code, same carrier prefix, same number Jason Miller used to call Harper’s former employer and accuse her of theft.
There’s a voicemail sitting in Evelyn’s box that the system never cleared. Old habit of hers. She’s never deleted anything she thought might be useful later, not in twenty-six years of marriage and not since. I play it.
Rebecca Miller’s voice, warm and grateful in a way that makes my stomach turn, thanking Evelyn for the invitation, saying what a joy it is to be included, how she hopes to discuss some investment opportunities with Evelyn and Killian while they’re there, how grateful she is that Evelyn’s been looking after Harper through this pivot in her career.
Looking after Harper.
Bullshit. My ex-wife only looks after stock prices.
I set the phone down on the desk before I do something to it I’ll have to explain to facilities, and sit there for a second with both hands flat against the wood, breathing through the particular kind of anger that doesn’t have anywhere useful to go yet.
Evelyn’s using an office on the second floor this summer, one she barely touched the previous ten years, showing up mostly to be seen at the right events and otherwise letting the place run without her involvement.
I take the stairs instead of the elevator, because I need the extra thirty seconds to make sure whatever I say to her comes out controlled instead of however it actually wants to come out.
By the time I reach her door I’ve mostly succeeded. Mostly.
The light’s on under the door when I get there.
I don’t knock.
She looks up from her desk, unbothered, a glass of wine already poured beside her laptop like she’s been expecting company. “Well. This is a surprise.”
“You invited Harper’s parents.”
“I did.” She doesn’t even attempt to look apologetic. “Sophia gets her parents at her launch. Why shouldn’t her little friend?”
“You called them. Three times. You left a personal invite code on a voicemail thanking them for being grateful, and you let Rebecca Miller think she’s about to pitch you and me on an investment.”
Something flickers behind her eyes, gone fast, replaced by the composure she’s spent a lifetime perfecting. “You’ve been digging through my voicemail.”
“You should have cleared it with me.”
“Why? You used to care about my opinion.”
“You used to be worth the sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice.” She laughs, short and sharp, the sound she’s perfected for moments she wants to feel bigger than she is. “Listening to me was a sacrifice?”
“Having to spend any amount of time on you is a sacrifice, Evelyn. One you’ve abused and manipulated for as long as I’ve known you.”
She tilts her head, considering me with an amusement that’s never once carried real warmth. “You didn’t seem to think it was a sacrifice for the first ten years, but I guess Harper must have had some otherworldly pu—”
I’m across the room before she finishes the word, close enough that she has to tip her chin up to keep looking at me, jaw tight, voice low and even because if I let it climb any higher I won’t be able to bring it back down.
“I dare you to finish that sentence.”
She doesn’t.
She holds my eyes for a long moment and then leans back, the smallest smile pulling at her mouth, hands lifting in mock surrender. “Fine. Whatever, Killian. Have your little summer fling.”
“This isn’t—”
“We both know it won’t last past the season.
” She touches a hand to her chest, right over the heart, and the gesture would read as sincere on anyone who hadn’t spent twenty-six years learning exactly how she operates.
“And her reconnecting with her loving parents,” the words landing with exaggerated tenderness, “would surely give her the push she needs to become something more than that one woman from that one summer who slept with her boss and his friends.”
I don’t say anything because there isn’t anything to say that doesn’t make it worse, and because she’s right about the part that matters most right now.
I can’t pull the reservation without raising questions I’m not ready to answer, not until midsummer’s behind us and I have something solid enough to take to the full board, and she knows it.
It’s written all over her face like she’s already won something, like she’s banked this for later the same way she banked Rebecca Miller’s voicemail.
I leave without another word, because there isn’t a version of staying in that room that ends well for either of us.
I make it back to my own office before I let myself feel any of it properly, closing the door behind me and standing there for a moment with my back against it, running the math on everything I still can’t say out loud yet.
Only a few more days until I have the votes locked.
Four days of Evelyn thinking she’s still holding every card, and Harper walking into Midsummer with no idea what’s waiting for her on that terrace, and me standing here unable to warn her without unraveling a plan that’s taken six weeks to build.
I think about telling her anyway. I run the scenario more than once, walking into the tasting room right now, pulling her aside, laying out everything I know in plain language and letting her decide for herself how to handle her own parents at her own event.
It would be the honest thing. It might even be the right thing.
But the moment I tell her, Evelyn knows I know, and the moment Evelyn knows, four weeks of careful, patient vote-counting collapses into a fight I’m not ready to win yet, fought too early, on her terms instead of mine, with Harper standing in the middle of it without the protection a few more days would buy her.
I’ve made worse trades than silence before. I’ve never made one that cost this much to watch play out.