“I know. I can’t believe it either. And it gets worse. She was pregnant.”
“When she left?” he says.
“Yeah. She didn’t know how to tell me. She was scared, and Daniel was in her ear telling her she’d ruin everything, and she was twenty-one and—” I stop and press my fingers against my eyes. “She lost the baby.” My voice cracks, and I clear my throat. “After she left. She was alone and she lost it and I didn’t know. I didn’t know any of it.”
When Noah speaks, his voice is lower. “God, Tully.”
“She went through that by herself.”
He exhales. Long and slow. I hear him shift.
“That poor girl,” he says quietly.
Something in my throat tightens.
“I keep thinking about that part,” I say. “More than anything. More than Daniel, more than the money, more than years of believing she never loved me like I loved her. I keep thinking about her grieving alone.”
“You would have been there. If you’d known, you would have been there.”
“Hell, yeah, I would’ve,” I say. “Noah, I don’t want to let this rest with Daniel, but I can’t put her or our families at risk.”
“Right.” He pauses. “We’ve gotta be strategic about this. What does she want?”
I think about her face when she told me not to let Daniel know that I know. The fear in it. The kind of fear that comes from having learned, repeatedly, what the consequences look like.
“She wants him to leave her alone,” I say. “She wants her dad to be safe. She wants to be able to stay in one place without waiting for the floor to drop out.”
“Okay,” Noah says. “So the goal isn’t revenge. The goal is to make her safe and make him unable to do this to anyone else.”
“Those things can coexist with revenge.”
“They can,” Noah agrees. “But revenge is a bonus, not the strategy. You start with the strategy.”
I breathe out. “Okay. I hear you. I need to hear this. Because right now I’m just so fucking pissed, I can’t see straight.”
“There are probably other people he’s done this to. Whichwould mean he’s not just a problem for you and Lola. And he has connections. My guess is he probably also has a trail of paperwork.”
I stop walking. Paperwork.
“You think I can find it?”
“I think he’s probably left more behind than he thinks he has,” Noah says. “And you have a lawyer.”
“Marcus.”
“Call Marcus in the morning. Tell him you need your agent’s financial history. Start with property holdings and LLC registrations in New York and Minnesota. And tell him to be quiet about it.” A beat. “Canyoube quiet about it? While he works?”
“Can I not kill him is the real question.” I exhale into the phone. “I can try.”
“Tully.”
“I can,” I say. “I can be patient. I want him to actually go down, Noah, I don’t want to just—” I push a hand through my hair. “I don’t want to just scare him into hiding. I want him to not be able to do this again. To anyone. But I want his days of tormenting Lola to be done for good. She’s changed because of him. She never deserved any of this.”
“Then let Marcus do his job,” Noah says. “He’ll probably know a great investigator, right? They’ll find something.”
I stand on the corner and look up at the polluted sky.
“Can you get a few hours of sleep?” Noah says. “Call Marcus when you get up.”
