Somewhere Between Us

Chapter 15: Half-Truths

Dylan didn't sleep well after their conversation about Julian, which Zoey learned mostly by osmosis, the light under his study door still on well past midnight, the second and third cups of coffee the next morning, the particular focused quiet of a man who'd decided to stop wondering and start looking.

"I had someone pull Julian's financial disclosures," he told her three days later, sliding a folder across the kitchen island with the careful, controlled movements of someone handling something that might go off. "Legally available information, board filings, nothing invasive. I just wanted to see the shape of it before I decided what to do."

"And?"

"It's worse than I thought." He rubbed a hand over his jaw, exhaustion sitting heavier on him than she'd seen in weeks. "He's been quietly divesting for almost a year. Not one bad month, a sustained bleed. If the pace holds, he'll have liquidated nearly everything he holds independently within a few more weeks."

"That matches what I overheard."

"It does." Dylan closed the folder, more gently than the moment seemed to require, like some part of him still wanted to protect his stepbrother even while cataloguing the evidence against him. "The timing bothers me more than the numbers. He started liquidating around the same time the trust clause would've come up in one of the estate reviews. Could be coincidence. Could be exactly the kind of thing a man does when he realizes what he stands to gain and starts making sure he's not obviously desperate for money right when it might matter."

"You think he's setting something up."

"I think I don't know what I think, and that scares me more than being sure of something terrible would." He exhaled, something hard and unresolved sitting behind his eyes. "I want to be wrong about him. I just don't trust myself to know the difference anymore between wanting to be wrong and actually being wrong."

The seed of something else entirely planted itself that same week, in an ordinary conversation Zoey almost didn't think twice about.

"Don't let it get too busy back there," said Marisol, the café's owner, watching Zoey wipe down the counter at the end of a slow Tuesday shift. She was in her sixties, silver-haired, sharp as a tack despite the reading glasses permanently pushed up into her hair. "I've been thinking about finally slowing down. My knees have been telling me to retire for two years, and I've finally started listening."

"You're not serious."

"Dead serious. Whoever buys this place needs to actually love it, though. Not just see a location." Marisol looked at her with something fond and assessing at once. "You'd know how to keep it right. Shame you're too busy being married to a billionaire to think about something like that."

Zoey laughed it off at the time, waved a hand, said something about not having that kind of money lying around even if she wanted it, which was true enough. But she found herself thinking about it later that night, staring at the ceiling, turning the idea over with more seriousness than she expected, not the money, which felt impossible, but the want underneath it, sharp and unfamiliar. She hadn't let herself want something just for herself in longer than she could remember.

She didn't mention it to Dylan. It felt too small, too personal, too much like handing him one more piece of her life to worry about when he already had Julian's finances and brake lines and a slow-building dread neither of them had named out loud yet.

It was at a dinner two weeks later, smaller this time, just Marguerite, Claire, and the two of them, Julian conspicuously absent with a vague excuse about work, that Zoey caught the first real sign that Marguerite had noticed Dylan's scrutiny of her son.

"You've been asking Halloway a lot of questions about the trust lately," Marguerite said, light as anything, pouring wine with a steady hand. "About the succession clauses, specifically. Should I be worried you're planning your own funeral?"

"Just being thorough," Dylan said, matching her tone exactly, though Zoey caught the small, deliberate stillness that came over him. "After the accident, I've been reviewing a lot of things I probably should have looked at years ago."

"Of course. Very sensible." Marguerite's smile didn't waver, but something moved behind her eyes, quick and calculating, gone almost before Zoey registered it. "You know, Julian's been under a great deal of stress lately. Work pressures, mostly. I do hope you're not letting that unfortunate accident put strange ideas in your head about your own brother."

"I'm not putting any ideas anywhere. I'm just being careful."

"Careful is wise." Marguerite reached over and patted his hand, the gesture warm and maternal on its surface, though Zoey found herself watching the woman's face rather than the gesture itself, some instinct flagging the moment as more deliberate than it appeared. "Though I will say, if you're looking for someone to be careful of, darling, you might do better to look outside this family than in it. Julian's temper runs hot, but you know how he is. All bark."

It was, Zoey thought later, turning the conversation over on the drive home, a strange thing to say, not really a defense so much as a redirection, gentle and precise, steering Dylan's suspicion away from her son without ever quite naming where else it should land. It should have felt reassuring. Instead it sat wrong, the way a too-smooth answer always did, and Zoey found herself trusting it less the more she turned it over rather than more.

"Your stepmother's strange," she said to Dylan, once they were home.

"She's always been strange. I've just started paying closer attention to which parts of it are strategic." He loosened his tie, something tired and wary settling into his expression. "That's what bothers me about tonight. She wasn't just defending Julian. She was managing me. There's a difference, and I've gotten good enough now at spotting it that I don't love what it might mean."

"You think she's protecting him from something specific."

"I think I don't know what she's protecting, or who from what," Dylan said, quiet. "I just know that every time I get close to a real answer about Julian, someone in this family finds a way to smooth it over before I can look too closely. Maybe that's just how families like mine work. Or maybe it means there's something underneath all of it I still haven't found."

Zoey sat beside him, quiet, thinking of Ashgrove and Meridian and a fire meant for someone who hadn't been there, the shape of a much larger puzzle sitting locked in her chest that she still wasn't ready to hand him.

"For what it's worth," she said carefully, "I don't think you should stop looking. Not at Julian. Not at any of it."

Dylan looked at her, something searching in his expression, like he'd caught the particular weight underneath her words without being able to name its source. "That's oddly specific advice."

"I contain multitudes," she said, echoing herself, and let him pull her down beside him, the two of them lying in the dark together, each carrying pieces of the same widening mystery neither one yet understood they were already, quietly, sharing.