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Maddox sent me over a little information about the money transfers, and asked for data in return, so I moved to my laptop to grab his answers.
Before I could reply, there was another note from him.
Maddox: Xander says it’s a good thing you’re getting out. This bank has a reputation.
Xander was Maddox’s older brother, and the two were night and day. Xander was a partner in a tech investment firm.
I figured the bank that held my loan wasn’t the best—they made shitty loans to people who couldn’t get them anywhere else—but I’d been desperate at the time, and now that I was paying them back, it was done and over.
Maddox: And Don is connected with them. He buys a lot of their foreclosures.
Don. The name made my gut curdle. The first boyfriend I had after my deployment ended. He’d been sleeping with Alys and me at the same time, without telling either of us, and had convinced us it was in our reputations’ best interests to keep things quiet.
Another example of me trusting the wrong guy.
I had such bad instincts when it came to men, but a glance at Gage, assembling bot pieces, and Sawyer working on the remote control…
Wait.
Don was also a real estate developer who had been trying to buy buildings on Main Street, to tear them down and revitalize.
Sawyer was originally here to buy me out. He couldn’t be connected…
No.
Now that the thoughts were there, about the bank, about Sawyer and Don, about deeper connections, I had to dig.
Whatever my brain was trying to tell me about Sawyer, it wasn’t true. He’d proven himself. I just needed to see proof and then I could shut up the doubt.
Proof of what? I wasn’t sure.
That Sawyer was who he said and nothing more.
I should’ve dug into the bank when I took out my loan, but I’d chosen to stay ignorant. Now, as I searched their name for a starting point, the bad news unfolded in front of me.
So many negative reviews.
About people being foreclosed on abruptly. Forced out of their properties without the proper warning, thanks to legal loopholes. Properties sold out from under business owners before they knew it was happening.
I should’ve sold to the guy who tried to undercut me on price just a few weeks before they foreclosed on me.
The text from the review glared at me, and I glanced at Sawyer again.
No.
Whatever my brain was trying to tell me, I wasn’t listening.
I had a new branch of the path to follow, though. Reviews talking about that buyer who showed up just a few weeks before they lost their buildings. The one person saying they discovered the buyer was associated with the bank.
And another reviewer saying the same thing.
And a third person, saying that Hudson Rawlings Sr was both an internal board member at the bank, and owned the real estate company who bought the reviewer’s property right before foreclosure.
Rawlings Real Estate.
Sawyer Rawlings.
The full picture slotted together in my mind, and I couldn’t deny it anymore.
