The First Silence (A Vineyard Legacy Club #1)

Chapter 1

Miami, Florida

Hannah didn’t set out to destroy her life.

Last year, when she’d begun investigating various city council members and their involvement in what she assumed was a run-of-the-mill financial scandal, she’d expected to do what she always did: write the article, get a few legal cases going, collect her paycheck from the newspaper where she’d worked for the better part of fifteen years, and move on.

But when her husband Kendall’s name kept popping up on various contracts and “secret files,” she grew alarmed.

What was Kendall up to?

For a long time, Hannah worked to refute her instincts.

Without telling Kendall what was going on, she tried to clear his name.

She’d tried to find a way to keep him out of it, to maintain the marriage she saw as protection, as necessary.

All the while, she played the part of the kind, devoted, and loving wife.

But when it became clear that Kendall was every bit the criminal her notes suggested that he was, perhaps higher up on the food chain of horror she’d been investigating, she couldn’t ignore it anymore.

Exhausted after months of working the case and destroying her sense of self, she entered her newspaper editor Josh’s office, closed the door behind her, and burst into tears. “I don’t know if I can do it,” she told him. “This is my family. This is my life.”

Josh, who was ten years her senior and twice divorced and therefore unconvinced about the “beauty” of marriage, crossed his arms and gave her a formidable look. “Did you get your master’s in journalism to roll over on a story as big as this?” he asked her.

Hannah shook her head slowly. She sniffed, allowing herself to experience, at once, thousands upon thousands of memories with her husband, Kendall, and their beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter, Minnie.

She could see Kendall at the hospital, holding their baby.

She could feel the love she’d had for him on their wedding day all those years ago.

What had happened to them? Where had the time gone?

“It doesn’t matter,” Josh said. “It’s a brilliant piece. It’s going to change the trajectory of the paper and your career. Like it or not, you’re a one-of-a-kind journalist. You can’t turn your back on yourself and all the work you’ve done. Otherwise, who else will you have?”

It was a balmy mid-March night before the story broke.

Hannah left the office well before her colleagues and drove fifteen minutes back to the beachside property she and Kendall had bought five years ago.

It occurred to her, as she cut the engine in the garage, that she never could have afforded a place like this on her own.

Kendall’s illicit dealings had very much set up her life.

She thought of her wardrobe of fine materials from the sleekest of boutiques.

A journalist’s yearly income didn’t match what she often got to wear.

She’d been living in plain sight of her husband’s illegal dealings for years. And she’d loved it, until she’d been forced to look at it head-on. Now, she was destroying him.

She felt as though the world was crumbling beneath her feet. She felt like the worst kind of hypocrite.

Hannah had half a mind to stay in the car the rest of the evening, to sleep until the newspaper came out tomorrow morning and Kendall understood just how far she’d gone.

But suddenly, Minnie came into the garage to grab a soda from the other fridge.

“Mom? What are you doing?” Minnie laughed and came over to the car, peering in the window.

Hannah tried to smile at her beautiful daughter, a girl who was mere years from womanhood and beginning to look more and more like Hannah’s own senior-year photos from more than two decades ago. Minnie didn’t often smile at her like this. She was her daddy’s girl.

After opening the car door, Minnie tugged at Hannah’s hand. “Dad wants to order sushi.”

“Of course he does,” Hannah said, hating how much her smile hurt her face. She allowed herself to be led out of the car, out of the garage, and into the backyard.

They found her handsome husband with a Ping-Pong paddle stuck between his upper arm and chest as he scrolled the sushi menu on his phone. He hardly looked up as he called, “I’m getting you the dragon roll, Hannah. And those little fried things you like?”

Hannah’s heart thrashed in her chest. She fought the urge to walk over to him and hug him tighter than she ever had, to burrow her face in the smell that had always been his—masculine and earthy and vaguely spicy from his cologne.

She fought the urge to drive to where the paper was being printed and burn the whole place down.

She’d done what she’d done. Like planting a bomb, she’d written the truth. And now, she had to wait it out.

As Kendall and Minnie played Ping-Pong, Hannah sat on a chair next to the glinting turquoise pool.

Kendall was trying to teach Minnie a better Ping-Pong technique, and Minnie was doing her best, angling her body and elbow in a way that looked unnatural.

Kendall had spent many years living in Germany, working in the financial district in Frankfurt, and he’d developed a startling love of the sport.

But he’d never been able to meet another American to match his talents.

When the sushi arrived, they sat around the marble outdoor table. Kendall poured Hannah a glass of her favorite rosé and cracked a beer for himself. He raised his glass to his daughter, then Hannah. “To my wonderful family,” he said. “I’m the luckiest man in the world.”

He had been the luckiest man in the world, Hannah thought then, filling her mouth with wine.

He’d known the right people. He’d been able to slip through various financial systems unnoticed.

He’d managed to create dodgy deals that filled not only his pocketbook but also the wallets of some of Miami’s sleekest political players. That luck was over.

The worst of it was the way Minnie looked at her father now.

Like he was the smartest, kindest, and funniest person Minnie had ever seen.

Minnie had never looked at Hannah that way.

Sometimes Hannah guessed this was because they looked too similar.

Minnie probably didn’t want to see what she’d look like in twenty years.

But more often, Hannah knew that Minnie didn’t think Hannah’s life as an investigative journalist was glamorous, especially compared to her father’s life of poolside meetings and swanky cocktails and late-night dinners.

Minnie wanted a moneyed, Miami life. She didn’t want graduate school and late-night study sessions. She didn’t want to have to struggle. She didn’t want to scour the streets for interviews and stories. She wanted to be beautiful and wear nice dresses and eat nice food.

Hannah couldn’t fathom what tomorrow would do to Minnie’s sense of self.

She was terrified.

After dinner, Hannah took the leftovers to the fridge and poured herself a second glass of wine.

A few minutes later, Minnie found her in the kitchen and asked if she could go to a neighbor’s for “an hour, tops.” Minnie was friends with nearly every kid in the neighborhood, a fact that had pleased Hannah till very recently.

Most importantly, Minnie was dating that kid Gavin, the one whose father was also named in many of the files Hannah had reported on.

In fact, many of the men in the neighborhood would also be taken down with Hannah’s article.

It was impossible to say how everyone’s livelihood would be affected.

But Hannah guessed that Minnie’s relationship wasn’t long for this world, either.

“Go ahead,” she said to Minnie, trying to smile.

Minnie headed off, leaving Hannah and her husband alone at the house.

Kendall was still by the pool, sipping a cocktail and reading something on his phone.

Hannah studied his profile and his thick head of hair, which he’d left the country to have a hair transplant for.

He’d treated it like a mini vacation. While he’d been away fixing his hair, Hannah remembered now that Minnie had tonsillitis, she had three major deadlines for the paper, and their dog had passed away. That hadn’t been Kendall’s fault.

But the hair did look really wonderful. Hannah imagined him combing it in prison and shuddered.

Kendall turned and made eye contact with her through the window.

He beckoned for her to join him by the pool.

Shivering, Hannah cut out the back door and sat on the concrete with her feet in the pool.

She studied the way her feet glowed in the pool light.

Kendall was telling her about something that had happened to him today.

It was something to do with traffic and how someone had wronged him somewhere.

She was supposed to laugh and tell him that everyone in the world was worse than him.

She might have done that on any other day.

But instead of answering, she allowed silence to fill the space between them.

She swallowed the lump in her throat, then turned her head to look at him.

He was on his phone again, scrolling. She wondered whether the better course of action was to tell him what was going to happen or to let it happen organically.

But she thought she might go crazy if she didn’t say something.

And wasn’t it the right thing to do? Didn’t she owe him that, at least?

With a quiet, raspy voice, she asked, “Why did you do it?”

Kendall allowed his phone to drop the slightest bit so that he could peer over it at her. His eyes were suddenly hollow and strange. “I beg your pardon?”

Hannah got to her feet, which were now cold from the water. “I know about the money.” She raised her chin. “I know where it came from.”

Kendall stood up to match her. But he was six foot four and nearly two hundred pounds, and Hannah was suddenly terrified of his physicality, of how he could pick her up and snap her in two if he wanted. She’d never really fathomed that before. She told herself to stand her ground.

Kendall let out a strangled laugh. “You don’t know anything.”

“I do.”

A flicker of fear passed over Kendall’s face. Another awful moment of quiet passed between them. “Do you remember what I told you when we got married?”

Hannah raised her eyebrows. “I do.” She remembered him saying, "I love you, and I’ll always love you." But she didn’t recall anything else.

“I told you I would always find a way to make you happy,” Kendall boomed darkly. “And haven’t I done that? Don’t we have the finest and most beautiful house on the block? Don’t we take wonderful vacations? Don’t you have better clothes than all your friends?”

Hannah flared her nostrils. “I never asked for any of that.”

“You did,” Kendall declared, one of his hands in a fist. “You didn’t ask for it in so many words. But you asked for it in all the ways that women ask for things.”

Hannah shook her head, feeling volatile and unsure of herself. Maybe bringing this up was a mistake. “I never meant for you to steal from people,” she said. “You remember what I was like when you met me.” She’d worn ratty secondhand clothing. She’d always taken the bus.

Kendall seemed to think twice about her tactics of threatening her. He fixed his smile and slid his fingers through his hair. “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding,” he said. “Maybe if we sit together in front of my computer? Maybe if we go over the numbers together?”

Hannah couldn’t move. But she asked again, because she couldn’t get beyond it. “Why did you do it?”

Kendall really exploded then. His face turned tomato red, and he pointed at her, as though he wanted to teach her a lesson.

“You always think you know best, Hannah, but you never really do. Get off your moral high-horse and come back to the real world.” With that, he stormed back inside, where he stomped upstairs, entered his study, and slammed the door.

When the story broke the following morning, Hannah was at a coffee shop she didn’t usually frequent.

She wore a baseball hat and sunglasses and reread her article on the newspaper app on her phone, both amazed and absolutely irate with herself for throwing her husband’s name into the ring like that.

When Minnie called her at half past eight, sobbing, Hannah couldn’t bring herself to ask why she wasn’t at school.

“Why did you do it, Mom?” Minnie demanded. “I don’t understand why you did it!”

Hannah’s heart shattered. “Where are you? Let me come pick you up.”

“No!” Minnie cried. “I want to be with Dad!”

Hannah shot out of the coffee shop and hurried home, praying that Minnie and Kendall were there, that they could have a family meeting and discuss the next steps.

But just as Hannah hurried up the driveway, she could see Minnie running back and forth through the house, calling out, “Dad? Dad, where are you?” Hannah knew before she entered the house that her husband was gone.

She knew, long before she read the note he’d left her in his study that told her what he really thought of her (what, apparently, he’d thought of her for a long, long time), that Kendall had left Miami to escape legal ramifications.

He’d probably had a plan set up for years, one that he’d follow if everything crashed in around him.

Hannah guessed that he’d never imagined his wife being the one to corner him. She tried to feel some amount of pride for having done it, for going with her professional instincts rather than saving her husband’s livelihood. But she felt hollow and scared.