Somewhere Between Us

Chapter 10: The Company Man

The Sterling Industries boardroom had the hushed, reverent quality of a church built entirely out of glass and quarterly earnings. Zoey sat near the back at Dylan's request, "moral support," he'd called it, though she suspected it was less about support and more about the optics of a devoted new wife sitting in on business she had no real stake in, and watched a room full of men in expensive suits debate numbers she only half understood.

Julian sat three seats down the table, tie perfectly knotted, posture perfectly correct, and said almost nothing for the first twenty minutes. When he did speak, it was to dodge a direct question about his personal shareholding position, deflecting with a joke that landed a beat too flat and a segue so abrupt that even the board members who clearly liked him exchanged a small, uncertain glance.

"Julian," the CFO said, not unkindly, "we still need those numbers from you before Friday."

"They're coming," Julian said, too quickly. "Minor accounting delay. Nothing that affects the larger position."

Dylan, at the head of the table, didn't react outwardly, but Zoey, who had spent two years reading the moods of café regulars and knew a tell when she saw one, caught the small, deliberate way his attention sharpened on his stepbrother before smoothing back into neutral. Old habit, she guessed. The watchfulness of a man who'd learned, somewhere along the way, that trusting family cost more than trusting strangers.

The meeting wrapped without incident, board members filing out with the particular energy of people relieved to be done, and Zoey found herself lingering near the elevator bank when Julian's voice, low and tense, drifted from a half-closed office door down the hall.

"I need it done by end of week, I don't care what the market's doing, I need out of that position before anyone notices the size of it." A pause, the sound of pacing. "No, don't loop in Marguerite. She doesn't need to know how bad it's gotten. Just move it. Quietly."

Zoey stepped back from the doorway before he could see her, heart doing something complicated. She didn't know what to make of it, whether it was simply a man drowning in a bad investment, or something with sharper edges underneath. That was the trouble with Julian, she was learning. Every version of him seemed equally plausible.

"He was selling shares," she told Dylan later, in the car, once she'd decided it was worth mentioning. "Quietly. Sounded stressed about it. Didn't want your mother finding out."

Dylan's jaw tightened, the easy afternoon posture draining out of him in an instant. "How much?"

"I don't know. I only caught the end of it."

He was quiet for a long moment, staring out at the traffic without really seeing it. "Julian's never been careful with money," he said finally. "He trades on impulse, chases whatever's hot, panics when it turns, doubles down instead of cutting losses. He's done it before, smaller scale. If he's quietly liquidating a real position now, it means it's gotten bigger than he can absorb quietly."

"You don't sound surprised."

"I'm not. I'm just tired of being right about it." Something flickered across his face, not satisfaction, nothing that simple. "He's spent years watching me build this company back up and telling himself, I think, that if he could just land one big win of his own, it would even the scales somehow. Prove he didn't need the Sterling name to matter."

"Does he hate you? Really?"

Dylan considered the question longer than she expected. "I don't know anymore. There's resentment, that much I'm sure of, Marguerite's spent every year since I came back holding me up as the standard. How fast I turned the company around, how effortless it looks from where she's sitting. It's not really about me, most of the time. I just happen to be the shape she reaches for when she wants to make a point." He paused, and something more guarded settled into his voice. "Whether it's stayed at resentment, I couldn't tell you. People carry things a long time before you find out what they've turned into."

"That's not exactly reassuring."

"I'm not trying to reassure you. I'm trying to be honest." He glanced at her, something unreadable in his expression. "I'd like to believe the worst thing Julian's capable of is bad investing and a bruised ego. I've believed worse things about people I trusted less and been wrong before."

It was three days later, at a private dinner Halloway had insisted was necessary for finalizing some detail of the Whitfield contract, that Zoey overheard something that unsettled her more than the shares ever had.

She'd stepped away from the table to take a call from her mother, and on her way back passed the open door of Halloway's study, where the lawyer's voice carried, low and dry, mid-conversation with someone she couldn't see.

"It's a standard succession contingency, nothing exotic. If the primary heir dies without an heir of his own, the estate can't just sit undefined, so it passes to the next eligible descendant. Dylan's father reviewed it when he restructured the trust, kept it exactly as it was. Every estate this size has some version of it. Doesn't mean anything's about to happen. It just means, on paper, Julian isn't nothing if something did."

A pause, a murmur she didn't catch, and then Halloway again: "I'm not saying it's relevant. I'm saying it exists, and given everything else, it's the kind of detail someone should be aware of."

Zoey stood very still in the hallway, the phone forgotten in her hand, turning the words over. A standard contingency. Every estate this size has some version of it. It was probably nothing, the ordinary, unremarkable architecture of protecting a family's assets against the unthinkable. But it sat oddly beside the shares, beside Julian's tense phone call, beside the careful, unfinished way Dylan himself had answered her question in the car, and she found she couldn't quite shake it as she made her way back to the table, sliding into her seat beside Dylan with a smile that took slightly more effort than it should have.

"Everything okay?" he asked, low, just for her.

"Fine. My mom says hi." It wasn't entirely a lie, and she told herself the detail about the trust clause wasn't worth mentioning yet, not until she understood what, if anything, it actually meant. She glanced down the table at Julian, laughing easily at something Claire had said, and found she genuinely couldn't tell, watching him, whether she was looking at a man who was simply tired and cornered, or a man who was very good at looking that way on purpose.

She filed the detail away regardless, the same careful instinct that had catalogued the phone call in the car and Feld's careless gossip, a small, uncomfortable weight added to a growing pile of things that didn't quite add up to anything, yet.

They left the dinner late, Dylan quiet and thoughtful in a way she was starting to recognize as him working through something he hadn't decided to share yet. It wasn't until they were nearly home, the city sliding dark and orange past the windows, that his phone buzzed with a text from his driver, and he frowned at it, distracted, before pocketing the phone again.

"Everything all right?" she asked.

"Fine. Car's acting up, apparently, something with the brakes. He's taking it in tomorrow." Dylan said it lightly, unconcerned, already reaching for the next topic. "Probably nothing. These things happen."

"Probably," Zoey echoed, and told herself it was nothing, the same way she'd told herself the trust clause was nothing, the same way she was starting to tell herself a great many things lately that she didn't entirely believe.