Page 32 of All In

“There was a girl in high school. Rachel.” He says the name carefully, like it still costs something even now. “We dated for almost a year. I thought it was real—as real as anything is at seventeen, anyway. Turned out she was far more calculating than I would have imagined. Especially considering her grades in Algebra. In any case, she knew exactly what my family was worth. Knew how it would likely be divided among the family members. Then decided that the amount was sufficient enough to put up with being my girlfriend.” His jaw tightens. “I found a string of texts to her friend that more or less laid the whole thing out. Strategy notes. She wasn’t subtle once I actually looked at her.”

“Leo.”

“It’s fine. It was a long time ago.” He says it like he believes it, mostly. “Rachel doesn’t mean anything to me. But knowing it happened to my dad first made the whole thing feel inevitable, like something that was always going to come for me too eventually. My uncle was a confirmed bachelor for twenty plus years because of it.”

“Your mom? And Rachel and others along the way, I’m sure. People kind of suck,” I say.

“I already explained how my mom handled marriage and motherhood. When she finally decided to leave, my dad offered her a settlement to make the whole thing clean and quick instead of dragging it out in front of me for years. She took it. Walked away and barely looked back.” He says all of this evenly, like a fact he’s worn smooth from handling it so many times. “I’ve never actually asked my dad how much money he gave her.”

“Does it really matter? It seems like even a single dollar paid to walk away from your child… ” I shake my head.

“I don’t think KiKi’s a monster. I think she just never wanted any of what she ended up with, and the money was the only part of the arrangement that ever made sense to her. But I grew up watching my dad close himself off, romantically, at least after that. And then Rachel happened, and it just confirmed everything I’d already decided to believe.”

I reach over put my hand over his laced fingers, and he goes still under the touch like he wasn’t expecting it.

“So you stopped leading with it,” I say. “The money. You let people get to know you first, and you wait to see if it changes anything once they find out.”

“Something like that.”

“And today, Eric did it for you. Before you got the chance to do it on your own terms.”

“Yeah.” His eyes meet mine, something raw and a little exposed in them. “And the worst part is, you defended me without even knowing what you were defending me from. You stood there and told him exactly where he could put his comment about my net worth, and I just stood there and let you do it, because I hadn’t earned the right yet to tell you what you were actually fighting for.”

I sit with that for a moment, turning his hand over under mine, lacing my fingers through his instead.

“For the record,” I say, “I’d have said the same thing even if I’d known. Maybe with extra emphasis.”

Something in his face cracks open at that, something bigger and more substantial than relief.

“I believe you,” he says quietly. “I think that’s actually the part that scares me most.”

“Why would that scare you?”

“Because it means I don’t have an excuse left to keep doing the thing I’ve been doing for fourteen years,” he says. “Which is staying safe by staying guarded. You’re making that a lot harder to justify.”

I should probably say something comforting here, something gentle and reassuring, and some part of me wants to. But there’s another part—the part that’s been sitting with a small, persistent ache since the vendor hall—that needs to say the truer thing first.

“Leo, I need you to know something too,” I say. “I get why you didn’t tell me. I do. After what you just described, I’d probably build the exact same walls. But I want you to understand that it still cost me something, sitting in that hallway today, realizing there was a whole part of you I didn’t have access to. Not because the money matters to me. It genuinely doesn’t. But because for a few hours today, I felt like I’d been auditioning for something without knowing the test was happening.”

He flinches slightly, like the words land exactly where I meant them to.

“That’s fair,” he says. “That’s completely fair, and I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to test you. I think I’ve just been so used to bracing for the test happening to me that I forgot what it looks like from the other side.”

“I wasn’t trying to pass anything,” I say. “I was just trying to get to know you.”

“I know.” He turns his hand, threading our fingers properly together. “And for what it’s worth, you did. More than anyone has in a very long time. I just did a bad job of meeting you there with the same kind of honesty.”

We sit like that for a minute, hands joined on the small hotel table, the room quiet except for the distant hum of the air conditioner and someone’s muffled television through the wall.

“So,” I say eventually, mostly to break the heaviness of it, “Forbes list. That’s wild. I mean Clover and I each have a trust fund that we received when we turned eighteen. While it’s allowed us to both go to college and live comfortably, no one is writing about us in Forbes. Do you have, like, a private jet? Should I be worried about my carbon footprint by association?”

A laugh surprises its way out of him, sudden and real, some of the tension in his shoulders finally easing. “No private jet. I fly commercial out of principle, mostly to annoy my accountant.”

“A man of the people.”

“Something like that.”

I smile, and something in the room settles, the worst of the tightness in my chest finally easing back into something more like the warmth I’d felt all day before Eric showed up with his terrible timing and his terrible mullet.