Hailey shook her head. “Not angry. So,sostressed. I can’t explain it. Rebekah—his wife—was trying to rip off the firm, and I... I know how it sounds, Mack. There’s no excuse; I’m not trying to make excuses. It’s crazy. But so is...”
Mack could fill in the rest:So is burning down a building. But Hailey had done it first, had set this chain of events in motion.
Sort of.
Not that Mack’s own record had been spotless... but still.
Their thoughts ended up in the same place. “You didn’t sleep with her, did you?” Hailey said now, softly.
“I told you I never touched her.”
“I believe you. But then why weren’t you outraged? Why didn’t you tell me sooner, ask for my help? How could you just sit back and do nothing while she trashed your career and your reputation?”
“Shedidn’t. Tech did. They completely overreacted. What was I—are we really talking about this now? That’s the least of our problems. This guy could send me to prison, Hailey.” He shoved the photographs back at her. “I might have killed someone, do you understand this? Maybe he wanted me to. Maybe that was the plan.”
“We’d have heard about it if this boy died. It would be on the news.”
Her coldness picked at the scabs of his rage. “Okay,great, so I’ve only maimed him for life, and your boyfriend can hang me for it whenever he wants to.” But as he said this, instead of running from her, he went and threw himself down on the stairs next to her.Beneathher; it felt like a surrender. Someone had him by the balls, and for once it wasn’t Hailey.
“I mean, why all these weird letters and...statements? This is someone pretty fucking crazy, Hailey, to do this. Is this guy crazy?”
“His ex-wife thinks so.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, waiting to go to prison? What the fuck am I supposed to do?” Mack’s heart was racing; his chest was tight. He stood up to shake it off, and for one fleeting second he glimpsed a final and terrible way out of this nightmare. The scariest thing was that imagining this brought him comfort, then, when he thought of his daughters, it brought tears. Great, he was crying again, in front of his wife, who hardly ever cried. At least not until recently.
Hailey put her hands on his shoulders; it was the first time she’d touched him in weeks. “There has to be a way out of this. If my job has taught me anything, it’s that there’s a way out of everything. If it’s David doing this, we’ll find something on him and head him off; or if the worst happens, we can say the photos were fake, we can say you acted under duress—there are so many things we can say.” From below, Mack saw her straighten her back and harden her jaw, and it made him feel safe, it pushed away that dark thought that was trying to sneak its way back into his brain again.
“I’m going to call Dennis,” Hailey said, “and I’ll go after this guy head-on.”
Mack felt so grateful for her resolve that the dirty and damning retort that popped into his head never found its way to his lips.
31.
I’m not going to lie: this situation has really turned itself around. We’re almost at the good part now, with hardly any arm-twisting at all. It could be quick from here. The pace is up to them, though: if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my father, it’s that it’s no good slowing things down at the eleventh hour.
It all worked out in the end, in case you are wondering. Yes, my father’s personal fortune was seized, his reputation ruined, his empire disbanded. Yes, he lost the penthouse and the Hamptons house and the Paris apartment and—this one hurt the most—theChasing Sunshine, but my father must have seen the gray skies gathering on the horizon, because he had his affairs in order. In our family safety deposit box, tucked among my mother’s jewelry (she hadn’t needed it, he’d said once, where she was going), there was a note to me in my father’s handwriting. It contained a short, uncharacteristic kindness, and also some bank details that have gone a long way toward erasing his failures as a businessman. Twenty-five million will buy you a lot of forgiveness, and so even though I’ve had to endure decades of dental work, and I had to change my name and uproot (get it?) my entire life, I do regret my last words to him as I watched him struggle to stay afloat, drowning in the disbelief that his own offspring had pushed him overboard: “Who’s the pussy now?”
32.
Hailey
Idon’t understand.” Hailey thought if maybe she shook her head long enough, Dennis would change his opinion. “How can you be so sure?”
“It just doesn’t feel like his financial signature.” He had come into Hailey’s office holding a baseball, and he stood before her tossing it from one hand to the other, which was making her want to kill him. “Look, I’ve been through all Rainier’s accounts, so I can see if he’s tied to these funds or Sunshine Enterprises in any way at all. His money’s spread out, some in trusts, some in bonds and crypto, but it’s all legit. He’s got no unexplained assets; apart from the boat he’s got no money-laundering red flags, and I can literally see exactly how he’s paid for everything.”
“How can you see?”
Dennis crossed his arms, and the baseball disappeared into his armpit. He pressed his lips into a straight line.
“What about the Bratenahl apartment?” Hailey thought of its rumpled gray bedsheets and stark surfaces and felt nauseous. “Rainier’s got an apartment in Cleveland that I don’t remember seeing in your original report on him.”
“Rented in September. Short term, no deposit, two thousand a month. I’ve seen the lease.”
“Could he be running money through his wife? What about something in Rebekah’s name?”
“That’s what westarted outlooking for, remember? There is literally nothing on this earth in Rebekah’s name except a yoga studio membership in Pepper Pike. You can be one thousand percent sure of that.”
Hailey could feel sweat on her forehead, on her palms. “What else can we do?”
