Somewhere Between Us

Chapter 12: What Her Father Left Behind

The insurance report and the newspaper clipping had lived in the bottom drawer of Zoey's dresser for three weeks, untouched, the way a wound gets bandaged and then, deliberately, not looked at again. She told herself she'd let it be. She told herself a lot of things lately that didn't hold up under any real pressure.

It was a slow afternoon at the café, Priya on register duty and Zoey on a break she wasn't supposed to be spending this way, that she finally typed the name into her phone. Ashgrove Property Group.

The first few results were nothing, dead links, a defunct real estate listing site, a decade-old business directory that hadn't been updated since before she was born. She was about to give up, telling herself she'd tried and that was enough, when she found it: a single archived filing from the state's business registry, the kind of document nobody outside a lawyer's office ever thought to search for. Ashgrove Property Group LLC, dissolved. A list of former officers, names that meant nothing to her, and beneath them, buried in a footnote about the company's original registered agent, a name that made her stomach drop clean through the floor.

Halloway & Associates.

She read it three times, the way she'd read the newspaper clipping three times, certain each time that she was misunderstanding something, that the coincidence would dissolve if she just looked hard enough. It didn't dissolve. Halloway was Dylan's lawyer. Halloway had been Dylan's family's lawyer, she was fairly certain, for a very long time.

Her hands were shaking slightly by the time she closed the browser tab, and she sat very still behind the espresso machine for a long moment, feeling the particular vertigo of watching two entirely separate parts of her life turn out to have always, somehow, been touching.

She didn't sleep well that night, turning the discovery over and over, trying to fit it into some shape that didn't implicate the man sleeping two rooms away. It could mean nothing. Law firms represented dozens, hundreds of clients over the years; a shared registered agent wasn't proof of anything except that both entities had, at some point, needed a lawyer in the same city. She told herself this so many times it started to sound less like reassurance and more like a woman talking herself out of something she already suspected was true.

She went back to the archive the next day, this time during her lunch break, hunched over her laptop at a different café entirely, some instinct telling her not to do this research anywhere Dylan might walk in unannounced. She dug deeper into the filing, the officers listed, the dissolution date, the property addresses associated with the LLC before it folded, and found, three layers down, a reference to a parent holding entity that had absorbed Ashgrove's remaining assets after dissolution.

Meridian Holdings, a subsidiary of Sterling Family Trust.

The words sat on the screen in front of her, small and unremarkable and absolutely devastating, and Zoey found she couldn't look away from them even as the café noise around her seemed to drop into a kind of underwater silence. The building that killed her father. Owned by a company that had, eventually, folded into the family whose name she now carried. Not conclusive, she made herself think the word carefully, the way she'd have coached a nervous client if she'd actually become the lawyer she'd once considered. Not conclusive. Just a thread. But a real one, finally, after a decade of nothing.

She closed the laptop, hands unsteady, and sat with the specific, complicated grief of it, not just her father's death resurfacing, but the strange, sick possibility that the family currently keeping her mother's medication paid for might also be the family responsible for taking her father away in the first place.

She almost told Dylan that night. She had the words ready, rehearsed twice in the bathroom mirror while brushing her teeth, some careful version that started with I need to tell you something and ended somewhere she hadn't quite figured out yet. But when she came out of the bathroom, he was on the couch with his laptop, tie already off, the particular tired slump of a man who'd spent the day fielding calls about brake lines and insurance investigators and a brother he didn't want to suspect, and something in her stalled.

He looked up and smiled, small and genuine, the kind of smile that had stopped feeling performed weeks ago. "Long day?"

"Something like that." She sat beside him, close, the warmth of him a strange comfort against the cold, unfinished thing sitting in her chest. "You?"

"Halloway's running down the brake report with the insurance investigator. Nothing conclusive yet. I'm trying not to think about it, which is going about as well as you'd expect." He closed the laptop, some of the tension easing out of him now that she was there, and reached over to pull her feet into his lap without asking, absent and easy, like it had always been something they did. "Tell me something that isn't about my family falling apart in slow motion."

She almost laughed at the timing of it, the particular cruelty of the universe handing her that exact opening at that exact moment. I found something about my father. It might be connected to your family. The words sat right there, ready, and she looked at him, tired, unguarded, trusting her in a way she hadn't earned yet and wasn't sure she deserved, and found she couldn't do it. Not yet. Not until she understood what it actually meant, whether it was a coincidence or something worse, whether telling him would help anything or simply hand him one more thing to carry in a week that had already handed him too much.

"Micah made the travel team's starting lineup," she said instead, which was true, and easier, and cost her nothing except the growing, uncomfortable weight of everything she wasn't saying. "First game's in two weeks."

"That's good. That's really good." He looked at her a beat too long, something searching in his expression, like he could sense the shape of what she wasn't telling him even if he couldn't name it. "You okay? You seem somewhere else tonight."

"Just tired." She made herself smile, made herself lean into him instead of away, and hated, distantly, how easily the lie came out now, how much smoother it had gotten since the wedding. "It's been a long week for both of us."

"Fair enough." He didn't push, the way he never pushed, and she told herself that was its own kind of mercy even as some small, honest part of her recognized it, uncomfortably, as the exact same silence she'd catalogued in him for weeks, the careful, deliberate art of not asking questions whose answers you weren't ready to hear.

She lay awake long after he'd fallen asleep beside her, staring at the ceiling, the name Meridian Holdings, a subsidiary of Sterling Family Trust running in a loop behind her eyes. She thought about the fire report, the phone call in the car, the trust clause, Feld's careless gossip about a man reappearing out of nowhere after years away, all of it sitting in the same drawer of her mind now, refusing to organize itself into anything she could name, except for the growing, sickening certainty that none of it was separate anymore.

She didn't know yet what Dylan knew, if he knew anything at all. She didn't know if the man sleeping beside her, warm and trusting and entirely unaware, was innocent of everything or connected to something he hadn't told her, the same way she hadn't told him. She only knew, lying there in the dark, that the marriage she'd signed for money had somehow become the one place she felt safest, and the one place, increasingly, she was most afraid to be honest.