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“Did you have a good time?” Zach asked.
There. That was the opening she needed. If she wanted it. Ask Zach why he’d thrown the party. But if she asked—if she pushed—then she would most likely let him know why she wanted to know. And maybe she’d been dumb enough to fall for Zach all over again, but she wasn’t going to be dumb enough to tell him that.
She was, however, going to be dumb enough not to let him go until she had to. A braver woman would cut her losses and run. But she knew she couldn’t. Even if there hadn’t been the record to think of, she wasn’t going to be the one to tell him to go. She’d keep the heartbreak to herself until he was safely off the island and couldn’t see just how dumb she’d been.
“It was lovely,” she said. Which was the truth. Apart from her realization about Zach, it had been a great party. But she didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about it might stray back into the territory of who had come up with the idea and then she’d be right back where she didn’t want to be. So she needed a different subject. And, like a gift, the memory of Zach and Faith and Mina returning to the party together came back to her as Zach turned the car into the Harper drive. “You know, before Billy decided to start the entertainment portion of the evening, I saw you and Faith and Mina together. Faith looked upset. Is everything okay?”
Zach glanced over at her, expression unreadable in the dim light, then looked away again as he turned into the entrance to the Harper estate.
“You might as well tell me,” Leah said. “Faith will eventually.”
That made his mouth quirk. “Dad always did say he might as well adopt you and Ivy given how close the three of you were.” The gates swung open in front of them, and he set the car into motion again.
“Well, let’s be glad he didn’t,” she said. “That would have made this”—she moved her hand back and forth between them—“all kinds of wrong. But I think you’re changing the subject. What’s going on?”
“Just Grey shit,” Zach said.
“That covers a pretty wide range of possibilities,” Leah pointed out. She tried to think of some of them. She knew that the business of tying up the loose ends of Grey’s estate had been dragging on. “Is this about the archive business? Faith said something about another storage locker ages ago. And a bank account?”
“She told you that?” He sounded startled.
“Well, who is she supposed to talk to?” Leah said. “You haven’t been around and Faith was trying to keep Mina out of the business hassles where she could. You know, with the whole dead husband thing? You can’t be mad at Faith for finding other people to confide in.”
Zach pulled up in front of the guesthouse. “I’m not mad … I guess I just hadn’t thought about it.”
“You not thinking about it is kind of the reason why she needed people like me to talk to,” Leah said, the words coming out sharper than she intended. She reached for the door and got out of the truck before she could say anything else. She was tired. And upset. But she didn’t want to fight with him.
Zach caught up with her as she was climbing the front steps. “Hey,” he said. “Slow down.”
She made herself stop. Turned to face him. “It’s been a long day.”
“I thought you wanted to hear about this?” He climbed two steps past her and sat down at the top, patting the wood next to him.
It was probably not a good idea to sit beside him. These steps and Zach were a dangerous combination, it seemed. But she sat anyway. “All right. Spill.”
He was leaning forward over his knees, hands clasped. She thought she saw his knuckles whiten briefly, but it was hard to tell in the moonlight. “Zach?”
“To answer your question, yes, it’s about the bank account. Turns out Grey paid a huge chunk of change to a woman named Ree Vacek six months or so before he died.”
Grey. Not Dad. So, not a good thing, necessarily. All three of the Harpers tended to use Grey when they were talking about Grey the alcoholic problem-child rock star rather than Grey the sometimes-decent dad. “Ree Vacek?” she said. “That’s not a name I know.”
Zach shifted on the step. “It’s not a name any of us know. The lawyers are looking into it. They’ve found the place where her bank account was opened. But not her. Not yet.”
“How much money?” she asked softly.
“Half a million,” Zach said flatly. “The lawyers can’t find any records of any sort of purchase or title transfer around that time, so it looks like it was just the money.”
Half a million dollars. That was a lot of money. She’d grown up in the music industry. She knew it wasn’t all music and happiness. There was a seedier side that went with famous men who women were happy to throw themselves at and who didn’t stop to think too hard about saying “yes” when they did. A side that involved lawsuits and paternity tests and … settlements. She had never heard that any of the Blacklight guys had had anything like that happen, but it didn’t mean it hadn’t. But Grey? Grey had never been shy about admitting he’d fathered a child. Hell, he tended to turn around and marry the women he knocked up. Lou and Emmy and Zoe were proof of that. But still …
“I take it by that silence that you’re thinking exactly what the three of us are thinking,” Zach said.
“There are lots of possible explanations. Maybe it was a charity. One of those internet good causes you see. You know he spent a lot of time in that last couple of years trying to make up for lost time and sort some of his stuff out. Maybe he felt like he could help someone?”
“Maybe,” Zach said. “But why hide it, if that was what he was doing? He did this in secret.”
“You really think Grey got some woman pregnant before he died?”
“I don’t know,” Zach said. “But my gut says maybe yes.”
