Page 99 of Her Rival

"What is it, Hartley."

I closed the laptop. I turned it so he could see the screen had been on, even though the screen was now dark.

"Tell me about J.S. Holdings," I said.

Everything in him stopped.

He didn't say anything. He didn't pretend he didn't know what I was talking about. He didn't perform confusion. He didn't ask how did you find that.

He just stood in his kitchen in his joggers and his wet hair and looked at me, and something in his face went still and resigned, the look of a man caught at a thing he'd always known would catch up with him eventually, and the smallness of his reaction told me, possibly more than the LLCs themselves did, exactly how prepared he'd been to have this conversation at some point with somebody, and how unprepared he'd been to have it tonight.

"Hartley," he said.

"Tell me about it."

"How much did you find."

"Forty-seven entities, Jett. Three states. Two foundations in Tennessee. A six percent silent stake in the team. A vintage automobile restoration LLC in Henderson with one employee named Earl. A venture capital fund in the Caymans I didn't bother trying to do the math on. A garage your sister doesn't know you own a fifty-one percent stake in, even though the holding entity is named after her."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah. Okay. That's all of it. Or most of it. There's two or three set up in offshore structures that wouldn't show on a U.S. filing, but those are just trust mechanics, they don't change the picture. You have the picture."

"How much, Jett."

He looked at me. He breathed in.

"Five hundred and twelve million," he said. "As of the last quarterly statement. Three weeks ago. Some of it's paper. Most of it's liquid. I don't usually run the numbers on it, because doing the math on it is a habit I don't want to be the kind of man who has."

I had not, before he said the number, fully understood that I hadn't actually believed the number was going to be the number it was.

I'd told myself, on the deck, that I was prepared for a big number.

I had not been prepared for a number with the word million in it five times over.

"Five hundred and twelve million dollars," I said.

"Yes."

"You have. Five hundred. And twelve. Million dollars."

"Yes, Hartley."

"And you have been letting me eat your spaghetti."

He almost laughed. He caught it. He killed it.

"This is not the funny part," I said.

"I know it isn't, Hartley. I wasn't laughing. I was registering the fact that you used spaghetti as the example, which I want you to know I appreciated, but I was not laughing."

"Tell me why."

"Why I have it or why I didn't tell you."

"Both."