Page 85 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

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.”