THE CON GIRL AND THE BILLIONAIRE PRIEST

Chapter 3

Kieran.

By 10:30am, Kieran had read the letter his late uncle left for him as part of his will. While it was shorter than he’d expected, and in the same spidery handwriting as the envelope, it still didn’t give him the strength it gave him the first time.

You will be tested by people who want what I’ve left you, and by your own certainty that you already know who you are. Trust slowly. Give people room to become who they’re capable of being, not who their circumstances made them.

No explanation of the trustee clause. No hint of what the late Gerald Dale had actually known, feared, or hoped for.

He had folded it back into its envelope and put it in the drawer of his desk. The past few weeks, he had gone about the business of learning gradually, what it meant to suddenly be responsible for a twenty billion dollars he had never wanted and didn’t fully understand.

His estate liaison, a brisk, efficient woman named Kelly Shelton who had clearly been hired to manage exactly this kind of transition, arrived at 11am with a leather folder of her own.

“We received this philanthropic proposal last weekend and have been studying it. Given the trustee clause, you’re required to personally review anyone proposing a formal partnership anyway,” Kelly tapped the folder. “You’ll want to at least look at this,” she said, laying it open on his desk.

“Head start, it's from one Julie Brown, the founder of a charity named Bright Start Collective. The proposal seeks funding for orphanage construction and charity in primarily East and West Africa. She’d requested a meeting to discuss a major partnership with the estate.”

“Thank you, Ms. Kelly.” Kieran replied, collecting the folder. He remembered the detective’s warning to play along.

“There are dozens of them,” Kelly continued, “But this one’s different. Her track record’s clean, with audited financials, verified builds, and board members with real credentials.”

Kieran pulled the folder toward him without much enthusiasm and flipped it open, revealing the intake photograph clipped to the front page, the standard headshot every serious philanthropic proposal seemed to include.

He went completely still.

The resemblance was there.

The sharp eyes, the lips that had curved into that unplanned, witty response in the church yesterday.

There was no mistaking it, no version of coincidence generous enough to explain it away, and Kieran’s fingers sat on the photograph; his hands feeling something far more complicated than restlessness in his chest.

The lips that gave him his first kiss. Except the name printed beneath the photograph wasn’t Olivia Mullins at all.

Julie Brown, Founder, Bright Start Collective.

“Kieran?”

He looked up to find Kelly watching him with mild concern, and realized he’d been silent for longer than was reasonable.

“I’m sorry — I was just reviewing the numbers,” he said, which wasn’t remotely true, and closed the folder with more care than the moment required.

“She said you’d agreed to meet her today. You want to move quickly on this one?”

“Not really. I just want to know the person behind the foundation.”

“I want to understand her,” he continued, which was closer to the truth.

Kelly nodded without asking further. She left him alone with the closed folder.

Twenty minutes later, Fr. Kieran still had a feeling that he hadn’t experienced since seminary. He felt this particular, unsettling sensation of the ground shifting.

He just couldn’t understand the strange, undeniable fact that the woman from yesterday who planned to request a partnership with his newly inherited fortune was the same as Olivia Mullins.

Something had stirred inside him the moment he saw her photograph, something older, and quieter, and far harder to name. A feeling that maybe had something to do with 40th Avenue, Queens.

He sat with it for a long time after Kelly left, fighting the sensation that had taken over him.

Perhaps what was actually happening to him had to do with a name, and laughs he’d have heard once, a very long time ago, in a life that had nothing to do with his priesthood or the trust funds his uncle left to him.

He hadn’t fully understood yet. But some part of him, older than his priestly training and more appealing than his control, already understood that the woman calling herself Julie Brown was not a stranger at all.

Whatever she wanted from him, the truth underneath it went back further than either of them currently knew.

He opened his desk drawer, took his great-uncle’s letter out again, and focused on the last line again. Give people room to become who they’re capable of being, not who their circumstances made them.

For the first time since Kelly left, it felt less like abstract advice and more like a warning aimed directly at him, even if it was uncomfortably precise.

He recalled, too, something he hadn’t let himself think about in years, a summer parish camp somewhere in Queens, of a girl with quick eyes and a temper she was always half-ashamed of. That girl who never stopped standing up for him, who’d disappeared from his life so completely and so long ago that he’d stopped, at some point without noticing exactly when, believing the memory was even reliable.

He had no proof of anything. He only had the photograph of a stranger and a feeling he couldn’t justify to anyone. That, together with a letter from his late uncle, urged him toward exactly the kind of patience he was now going to need, more than he’d ever needed in his life.

He didn’t call Kelly. He didn’t call his attorney or detective Farley.

He sat alone in his office until it was time for afternoon Mass, turning the letter over in his hands, thinking about that summer he’d almost let himself forget on purpose because remembering it had never once done him any good.

He remembered a tree house with a rope ladder their parents never approved of. He remembered a girl who cheated at cards and never once apologized for it.

The girl he never minded losing to. He remembered, most of all, the horror everyone faced, searching for three days and not finding her at all. He remembered the silence that had settled over their street and lives afterward, the kind that never fully lifted no matter how long.

He had never let himself hope, in all that time, as hope was a weighty thing to bear.

And now a stranger with her eyes had walked into his newly inherited life carrying a folder full of careful, convincing lies, and some part of him, despite his training and walls, had already decided, without his permission, exactly how far he was willing to go to find out the truth.

He decided, with the same quiet certainty he brought to every decision that mattered, that he would meet Olivia Mullins and let her tell him whatever version of the truth she’d built for herself — and that he would not, no matter what happened, let her see how much he knew.