23. Dani #2
I was angry that he'd built an entire system of legal camouflage to keep the money away from a world he'd stopped trusting to be told things at the age of eighteen, and I was angry because the system was so good that even the woman he was sleeping with, who'd lain on a shag rug in front of his bed twenty hours earlier and let him spank her until she came, hadn't been able to see through it.
I was angry that he'd spent the entire weekend protecting me with a network I hadn't known existed, paid for with money I hadn't known he had, and hadn't used a single sentence of any of the long quiet conversations we'd had in his kitchen or his car or his bed to say also, by the way, here is the size of the operation you are inside of.
I was angry that I'd thanked him for hiring Hollis Briar without ever asking how do you have Hollis Briar's personal cell phone number, and what's the retainer on that.
I was angry that he'd let me thank him for things he could afford with the ease of a man buying coffee.
I was angry, in the end, because the asymmetry between us had been a different asymmetry than I'd known I was inside of, and I'd been a participant in it without consent, because the consent would have required disclosure, and the disclosure was the thing he hadn't done.
I went back inside. I made myself a sandwich. I ate half of it.
I sat at the kitchen island and did the rest of the work on the LLCs, because the writer brain that had found the second thing now wanted to know exactly how deep the second thing went, and the answer was extremely deep, and the going-deeper was a thing I needed to finish before I had any conversation with him about any of it.
By six I had a complete picture.
By six-thirty I'd decided what I was going to say.
By six forty-two I'd texted Brynn.
Coming over after dinner. Need to talk.
She replied in eleven seconds. Bring wine.
The garage door opened at seven oh four. I heard the door from the garage to the mudroom. Heard him drop his bag. Heard him kick his shoes off.
He came into the kitchen. Joggers and a hoodie, hair still wet from the team's shower, his face wearing the specific quiet pleasure of a man coming home to a woman who was still going to be in the kitchen when he got there. The face changed when he saw mine.
"Hey," he said. Careful.
"Hey."
"What."
"Jett."
"What is it, Hartley."
I closed the laptop. I turned it so he could see the screen had been on, even though the screen was now dark.
"Tell me about J.S. Holdings," I said.
Everything in him stopped.
He didn't say anything. He didn't pretend he didn't know what I was talking about. He didn't perform confusion. He didn't ask how did you find that.
He just stood in his kitchen in his joggers and his wet hair and looked at me, and something in his face went still and resigned, the look of a man caught at a thing he'd always known would catch up with him eventually, and the smallness of his reaction told me, possibly more than the LLCs themselves did, exactly how prepared he'd been to have this conversation at some point with somebody, and how unprepared he'd been to have it tonight.
"Hartley," he said.
"Tell me about it."
"How much did you find."
"Forty-seven entities, Jett. Three states.
Two foundations in Tennessee. A six percent silent stake in the team.
A vintage automobile restoration LLC in Henderson with one employee named Earl.
A venture capital fund in the Caymans I didn't bother trying to do the math on.
A garage your sister doesn't know you own a fifty-one percent stake in, even though the holding entity is named after her. "
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Yeah. Okay. That's all of it. Or most of it. There's two or three set up in offshore structures that wouldn't show on a U.S. filing, but those are just trust mechanics, they don't change the picture. You have the picture."
"How much, Jett."
He looked at me. He breathed in.
"Five hundred and twelve million," he said. "As of the last quarterly statement. Three weeks ago. Some of it's paper. Most of it's liquid. I don't usually run the numbers on it, because doing the math on it is a habit I don't want to be the kind of man who has."
I had not, before he said the number, fully understood that I hadn't actually believed the number was going to be the number it was.
I'd told myself, on the deck, that I was prepared for a big number.
I had not been prepared for a number with the word million in it five times over.
"Five hundred and twelve million dollars," I said.
"Yes."
"You have. Five hundred. And twelve. Million dollars."
"Yes, Hartley."
"And you have been letting me eat your spaghetti."
He almost laughed. He caught it. He killed it.
"This is not the funny part," I said.
"I know it isn't, Hartley. I wasn't laughing. I was registering the fact that you used spaghetti as the example, which I want you to know I appreciated, but I was not laughing."
"Tell me why."
"Why I have it or why I didn't tell you."
"Both."
He pulled out the stool across from mine. He sat down. He put both hands flat on the island between us the way I'd put both my hands flat on Brynn's island when I'd told her everything two days ago.
He took a slow breath.
"I have it," he said, "because I've been making it for eight years and I started making it on purpose, because at eighteen I was a kid who'd been thrown out of his hometown and I was extremely scared of ever having to go back, and the only way I could think of to never have to go back was to make so much money that I was never going to be at the mercy of any man in any room ever again.
I started with my signing bonus. I made the first ten million in five years and the next hundred in three after that, and after a certain point the money became its own thing and I let it.
I've been a person who quietly owns things for a long time.
I have not been a person who talked about the things I quietly owned, because the not-talking was the entire point.
The point of having the money was to know it was there.
Not to use it. Not to perform it. Not to be a man other people saw the size of. "
"Okay."
"And I didn't tell you because I didn't tell anyone.
I haven't told Coach. I haven't told Brynn.
Rhett knows because Rhett was the person I made the first investment with and Rhett wouldn't be Rhett if he didn't know, but Rhett is the only person in my life who knows the full picture.
Victoria knows pieces because she had to be told certain pieces when I bought into the team's concessions subsidiary, which I had to do through an attorney she also uses, but Victoria doesn't know the full picture either.
The full picture has, until tonight, been a thing one other man on earth has ever seen, and that man has been carrying it for me for eight years and has never told anybody, and now you've seen the full picture, which means two people on earth have seen it, which means we're now going to have a conversation I've been bracing for a long time. "
I sat with that.
I said nothing.
I'd been ready to be angry. I'd practiced the angry version on the deck at four thirty-five.
I had a version of the conversation in my head where I told him I was a person, not a security risk, and where I told him that being on the inside of his life meant being told the size of his life, and where I told him he'd been treating me, by not telling, the way his church had treated him, which was as a person who couldn't be trusted with information.
That was the version I'd brought into the kitchen.
The man across the island had not given me the conversation I'd brought with me.
He'd given me a different one.
He'd told me a thing he'd told one other person on earth.
"Five hundred and twelve million dollars," I said again, slower this time.
"Yes."
"Jett."
"Hartley."
"I would have been okay with it."
"I know."
"I would have been okay with you having a hundred dollars or five hundred and twelve million dollars or whatever number was the real number. I would have been okay with it."
"I know that too, Hartley."
"Then why."
"Because I've been hiding it since I was eighteen, and I've been hiding it from people I've loved since I was eighteen, and I've built the entire architecture of my Vegas life around the hiding, and you're the first person I've been with who I've wanted to tell, and I didn't figure out how to tell you fast enough.
That's the whole answer. There's no version of it that doesn't end with me apologizing for being slow. "
"You should have told me when you hired Hollis."
"Yes."
"You should have told me at the dinner downtown."
"Yes."
"You should have told me, possibly, the morning after the first time we slept together, if you wanted me to feel like I was on the inside of your life and not on the inside of a piece of your life you'd agreed to let me see."
"Yes, Hartley."
"You should have told me."
"I should have told you."
"I'm not asking you to apologize."
"I know."
"I'm telling you I needed to be told."
"I know."
"And I'm going to go to Brynn's tonight."
He did not move.
"Not because I'm angry. Not because I'm done.
Not because I don't want to come back. Because I've been in this house for two days and I've been in this man's life for three weeks and I've just found out a thing about you the size of which is a thing I'm going to need a night to sit with by myself, on a couch with my best friend, with a glass of wine.
I'm not running. I'm taking a night. Do you understand the difference. "
"Yes."
"Tell me you understand the difference."
"I understand the difference, Hartley. You're taking a night. You're not running. You're coming back tomorrow."
"Possibly the next day."
"Fine. The next day."
"And you're not going to text me forty-six times between now and then."
"I'll text you twice."
"Twice."