My heart pounds, but I lean back. “That’s fine. I want him to know anyway. And while you’re at it, you can tell him why I wanted to get revenge on you.”
Vaughn’s face goes still.
“Since you’ve just admitted what you did,” I say. “I’ve got it recorded.”
I bring my phone up from under the table, holding it up so the recording app is visible on the screen.
The color drains from Vaughn’s face.
“You—”
“You walked into my meeting room and confessed to stealing my intellectual property. On tape.” I keep my voice level. “Funny how things work out.”
For a moment, neither of us speaks. Vaughn’s staring at my phone like it’s a loaded weapon. Which, in a sense, it is.
I should feel triumphant. This is what I wanted for eight years—proof, leverage, justice. The ability to make Vaughn Mansley face consequences for what he did to a kid who was too poor and too powerless to fight back.
But my mind won’t stop doing something inconvenient.
It’s doing math.
Vaughn stole my idea when I was fresh out of college. I was twenty-two, and Vaughn was a few years older—twenty-five, twenty-six.
Archie started college at fifteen.
Which means around the time Vaughn stole my idea, Archie had just gotten into Harvard as a fifteen-year-old. The Mansley parents’ attention would have been entirely focused on their younger son.
And Vaughn—Vaughn who’d been the golden child, the protector—would have been desperate to do something to impress his parents and prove he was still worth their attention.
So he’d stolen an idea from a naive colleague who trusted him. Not because he was a sociopath, but because he was a twenty-five-year-old who’d lost his place in his own family to his genius younger brother. He’d grabbed at the first thing that might make him feel like he mattered.
It doesn’t excuse it.
But it explains it.
I stare at Vaughn. He looks so much like Archie. The shared DNA is written all over him.
But it’s not just DNA that Archie and Vaughn share. They also share a childhood of memories. A history that shaped both of them into who they are.
Archie’s perception of himself was shaped by Vaughn.
They are brothers.
Brothers.
I think about my little brother, how I’ve spent years throwing money at his rehab stints, telling myself this time would be different. How I’ve sent checks when what he probably needed was for me to show up. How distance became my excuse for not being present, and money became my substitute for love.
How Vaughn has just flown around the world to protect his little brother, whom he hasn’t spoken to for over a year.
Whatever else Vaughn Mansley is, he’s someone who got on a plane the moment he thought Archie was in danger.
That’s not nothing.
My mind races. What can I do? Tell Archie the truth about how his accident happened and that I’ve fallen in love with him?
And then what?
I try to picture it. Archie, sitting across from me, learning that I targeted his brother and injured him by mistake. That every day we’ve spent together started with a lie. Even if he forgives me—and that’s a colossal if—the truth would sit between him and Vaughn like a wall.
