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Mariella took the jacket and buried her nose in the fabric. She could smell Harrison’s cologne, and it took all her willpower not to cry. Joe placed a hand on the center of her back, and she immediately felt comforted.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Joe said. “We’ll leave you to your duties.”
Dr. Malone sent Mariella a sympathetic smile before crossing the room to a locked door. Mariella watched as he punched in a code and placed his thumb on a fingerprint scanner. The door, eventually, opened. Whispering Oaks took privacy very seriously indeed.
Joe’s hand fell, and Mariella felt bereft. She watched as he walked over to the side table holding a pitcher of water flavored with mint and lime slices. Mariella nodded when Joe asked her if she’d like a glass. Mariella noticed Joe’s hand shaking as he poured the water from the pitcher into a crystal glass. Taking a moment to look at her old friend, she noticed that the grooves running past his mouth were deeper than normal, his lips thin and his normally merry eyes bleak. Joe looked like he held the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Mariella gripped Harrison’s jacket tighter and felt the crunch of paper beneath her fingers. Curious, she opened the jacket and pushed her fingers into the inside pocket. She pulled an envelope from the pocket, saw the printed address on the back flap and frowned.
The letter was from the Cayman Islands. Mariella frowned and flipped the envelope over. A logo was printed in the top corner, and the tiny letters under the crest read “Finco International Bank.” Seeing that her children were walking toward the balcony, Mariella gave in to her curiosity and slid her finger under the flap and pulled the letter from the envelope. She flipped it open, saw that it was a statement from a bank account, and her eyes dropped to the bottom of the page. The credit balance was in excess of a hundred million dollars.
“Mariella, your water.”
Mariella lifted her hand to take the glass Joe held out to her, but her fingers refused to grip the icy surface and the glass dropped to the carpet. Water droplets hit her shoes and her bare calves, and an ice shard bounced off the high gloss of Joe’s dress shoe.
That’s my life, Mariella thought, flowing away from me.
Mariella felt Joe take the paper from her hand and his eyes scanned the document. He whistled, carefully folded the statement again, looked at her, and his single fuck bounced off the walls of the reception room.
“Joe?” Mariella looked at him. “What’s going on?”
Joe took her hand and held it between both of his. “Well, that helps me with the decision I’ve been struggling with.”
Mariella frowned. “What decision?”
“About how much to tell you and when.” Joe raked a hand through his hair. He looked to where her children were standing on the balcony. “Let’s go outside, and we’ll sit down and have a conversation,” Joe suggested. “There are—” he hesitated “—things to be said.”
She didn’t want to hear; she didn’t want her life to change. She wanted Harrison to wake up, her life to go back to what it was. But that wasn’t going to happen, not today. Mariella nodded, straightened her shoulders and forced her legs to walk toward the balcony, toward this new life that she neither wanted nor requested.
* * *
Mariella sat down on the closest seat and stared out to sea, looking for the boat th
at she’d caught a brief glimpse of earlier. It was nowhere to be seen. A hundred million dollars in a bank account she knew nothing about? God, had Harrison become involved in something shady, like money laundering or drugs? His Vegas hotels operated casinos, and he routinely came into contact with men from the other side of the financial tracks. Had someone lured him into a deal that colored outside the lines? Harrison’s ambition was the driving force in his life, and he’d never outgrown his desire to prove himself to her, to out-rich his in-laws. He could now buy and sell the Santiagos a few times over, but the ambition and the drive for money hadn’t abated; if anything, they had strengthened over the past decade.
Mariella stroked the fabric of Harrison’s jacket, which she’d draped across her knees. Thinking she might’ve missed something else, she searched the other pockets of his jacket, which were empty, except the side pocket, which contained, as Dr. Malone said, his wallet. She flipped through it, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. Around a thousand in cash, his no-limit credit cards, his driver’s license. Nothing else. It was clean, uncomplicated. Everything that her life, at this present moment, was not.
Joe gestured to the outdoor furniture and called out, “Sit down, everyone. I think we need to talk.”
Mariella frowned at his stark-with-worry face. She watched as he poured wine for her and Elana from the bottle in the ice bucket on the white cast-iron table. The men each took a beer, and they sat down in a rough circle.
Mariella placed her glass on the table in front of her and linked her hands around her knees.
“Obviously, this has been a horrible time, and we are all deeply worried about Harrison, but there is still much to discuss,” Joe said, his voice rough with emotion.
Mariella nodded, his blunt attitude pulling her out of her shocked state. “Business stills needs to be handled, and decisions still need to be made. We need to discuss how that’s going to happen.”
Joe cleared his throat. “Before we get to that, there is something you should know.”
Here it comes, Mariella thought. The train was gathering speed...
Joe withdrew an envelope from the inside pocket of his slouchy linen jacket, and she realized it was the bank account statement she’d found in Harrison’s jacket pocket. It was a measure of her state of mind that she hadn’t realized that Joe had taken possession of the document. Joe handed the envelope to her, and Mariella slid it into the long side pocket of her limited-edition Fendi bag.
“What’s that?” Gabe asked, always observant.
Joe raised his eyebrows at Mariella, and she knew that he was leaving to her the decision to tell the children about the bank account or not. Her instinct was not to tell them, to shield them from this latest bombshell. She also wanted to try to work out why Harrison had kept the bank account a secret and, hell, whether there were other secrets she wasn’t privy to. Her children would ask questions she couldn’t answer. No, it was better that they remain in the dark about the king’s ransom gathering interest in their father’s name. Dammit, Harrison.
Before lifting her head to look at Gabe, Mariella dropped her sunglasses over her eyes, not willing to take the chance that Gabe would read her eyes and know that she was about to, deliberately, deceive them.
