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“Or at least they didn't at first.”

“What changed?” Chiara asks.

“I started watching him.”

Carolina goes very still.

“I've sat through his meetings. I've watched him with the players. I've listened to him argue about the new facility. I've seen him spend twenty minutes discussing whether injured players have enough privacy in the medical wing and another fifteen debating how far families have to walk between different areas of the complex.”

Finley smiles.

“He argued about that?”

“For fifteen fucking minutes.”

“That sounds like him,” Carolina murmurs.

“He remembers everything,” I continue. “Performance numbers. Injuries. Contracts. Recovery schedules. But he remembers things that aren't statistics too.”

I hesitate.

“Things that don't make him money.”

Nobody jokes now.

“He knows which players have families. What they need. What the wives do. He knows which programs matter to the community. He cares about youth rugby. He cares about the people working for the organization. He cares whether this team has a future ten or twenty years from now.”

I look around the table.

“That isn't how someone behaves when he's waiting for an investment to become profitable.”

Carolina's expression softens. Just slightly.

“So what do you think now?” she asks.

Now. That's a considerably more complicated question.

“Now I think I started with the wrong assumption.”

“And what assumption was that?”

“That the money was supposed to come back. I kept looking for the angle. The acquisition that would make everything else make sense. Media rights. Real estate. Brand expansion. Some long-term financial play nobody else saw coming because Mitchell is always ten moves ahead of everyone.”

I shake my head.

“But what if there isn't one?”

Carolina's eyes remain locked on mine.

“What if the Rovers were never supposed to make Mitchell richer? What if there’s another reason why he did all this?”

Something flickers across her face.

She knows.

I fucking knew it.

Maybe not everything I'm looking for, but Carolina knows the answer to this question. She worked for him. She knows him.