I Married My Father's Worst Enemy

Chapter 2: What He Did

I don't sleep.

At six a.m. I'm in the kitchen when my father comes down in his robe, and I don't let him get to the coffee maker before I start.

"Who is Edmund Ashford?"

He stops. His hand is still on the cabinet door.

"Where did you hear that name?"

"I didn't. I'm guessing, because Damon has the same eyes as a man in a photo I found in your old desk drawer when I was twelve, and you told me it was 'nobody,' and I believed you because I was twelve." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "Who was he, Dad?"

My father sits down slowly, like his body has aged ten years overnight. I have never once seen him look old before. Tired, sure. Stressed during earnings season. Never old. It scares me more than anything he's said so far.

"My partner," he says. "A long time ago. Before you were born, we started a firm together. Ashford and Hartley."

"And?"

"And it fell apart." He says it too fast, too smooth, like he's said this sentence a thousand times to make it feel true. "Bad market. Bad timing. These things happen."

"That's not what Damon thinks happened."

His jaw tightens. "Damon was twenty-four. He doesn't know the whole story."

"Then tell me the whole story."

"It's ancient history, Elena. It has nothing to do with the wedding."

"He brought it up right before he told me I'm marrying him in three weeks. It has everything to do with the wedding." I lean across the table. "What happened to Edmund Ashford?"

My father's face goes gray. "He died."

"How?"

"Elena—"

"How, Dad?"

"He took his own life." The words come out flat, rehearsed, like he's been bracing for this question for twenty years. "It was a terrible time. The firm was collapsing, there were allegations, it destroyed him. It wasn't my fault."

Allegations. I catch the word and hold onto it. "What allegations?"

"I have a meeting," my father says, and stands up so fast his chair scrapes the floor. "We'll talk tonight."

He leaves me sitting in the kitchen with my coffee going cold and a dead man's name in my mouth.

I call in sick to a job that might not exist by Friday, then spend two hours doing the only thing I know how to do when I'm scared. I dig. Old news archives, court records, anything with the words Ashford and Hartley in the same sentence. Most of it is paywalled or scrubbed clean — twenty years is a long time to bury something properly.

Then one site lets me in on a free trial, and there it is.

A business-page scan, grainy and gray. ASHFORD-HARTLEY COLLAPSES AMID FRAUD PROBE. FOUNDING PARTNER DEAD AT 51. Below the headline, a smaller photo from what must be the funeral — a boy, maybe twenty-four, standing alone at the edge of a grave in a black suit that doesn't quite fit him. My father stands closer to the casket than the son does. Younger. Composed. His hand on another man's shoulder, like he's the one who needs comforting.

I print both pages with hands too unsteady to hold my phone.

By ten, I'm standing in the lobby of Ashford Global, forty floors of black glass that used to be somebody else's dream before it became Damon's revenge, the printed pages folded into my coat pocket like evidence I'm not sure I have the right to carry.

His assistant tries to stop me. I don't stop.

He's at his desk when I walk in, jacket off, sleeves rolled, and for one unguarded second before his face closes over, he looks almost glad to see me. It's gone as fast as it comes, and then it's back to business, the way it always is with him now — like the boy who used to sneak me extra dessert learned somewhere along the way that softness gets you robbed.

"Elena." He doesn't stand. "You're early. The contract isn't finalized until Friday."

"I'm not here about the contract."

"No?" He leans back. Ten years ago the boy I half-remembered from childhood was gentle, easy to laugh. This version of him is carved out of something harder, and I hate that I notice the way his forearms look, the way his voice drops low and even when he's at his most dangerous. "Then why are you here?"

I set the printed pages on his desk instead of answering.

He looks down at them for a long moment. Something moves through his face — not surprise, more like an old wound getting pressed on purpose. His hand comes to rest flat on the desk, fingers spread, like he needs the wood to stay upright.

"I've seen the photo," I say. "You, alone at the edge of the grave. My father closer to the casket than you were. Tell me what my father did to your father."

"Your father told you it was ancient history."

"He told me your father killed himself and it 'wasn't his fault.'"

Damon's jaw works. For a second I see something underneath the control — something raw, something that looks a lot like grief that never got to finish grieving. "My father trusted his business partner with everything. The books. The filings. His name on documents he never read closely enough because he thought loyalty went both ways."

"And?"

"And when the fraud came out, only one signature was on the paperwork." His eyes don't leave mine. "It wasn't your father's."

My stomach turns over. "You're saying your father—"

"I'm saying my father took the fall for a crime that made your father rich, and six weeks later he was dead, and your father was the executor of his estate. Convenient, don't you think? The one man who could have proven what really happened, controlling everything that was left of him." He steps around the desk, closer now, close enough that I have to tip my head back to hold his eyes. I can smell cedar and rain again, and underneath it, something angrier. "Ask your father whose signature is on the death certificate."

I can't breathe right.

"Why didn't you go to the police? Twenty years ago, if you believed—"

"I was twenty-four and I had nothing. No proof. No money. No name anyone would believe over Richard Hartley's." His voice drops even lower. "So I spent twenty years building something bigger than his instead. And now I'm about to own everything he has left."

"Including me."

"Including you." He reaches up, and for one terrifying second I think he's going to touch my face, and worse — I think I might let him. His hand stops an inch from my cheek. "You have his eyes, you know. I used to think that was the prettiest thing I'd ever seen."

"And now?"

His hand drops. Whatever softened in his face a moment ago is gone, locked back down tight.

"Now I'm not sure if I want to kiss you or ruin you," he says. "Ask your father about the death certificate, Elena. Then tell me if you still think I'm the villain in this story."