Chapter 5

Too Convincing:

I’ve sat through board meetings with less tension than the car ride home from my grandmother’s estate.

Ivy on her side of the back seat, looking out the window like the passing trees owed her money. Me on mine, trying to work out what exactly happened in that hallway before she found me on the terrace, because something had happened. I could see it on her, the way you can see weather turn on someone’s face right before the rain actually hits.

“You’re quiet,” I said.

“I’m tired. Long night.”

“Not the same thing as quiet. You know that.”

She looked at me then, something guarded behind her eyes I hadn’t seen from her before, not even in that first hallway when I was asking a stranger to marry me on paper. “Does your grandmother do that to everyone? The staring.”

“Sometimes.”

“Does she usually ask people’s dead mothers’ names like she’s running a lineup?”

Didn’t have an answer for that. Bothered me more than it should have. I’ve spent eight years learning to have an answer for everything Eleanor does, cataloging her, staying two steps ahead of whatever move she’s about to make, and right then I genuinely didn’t know why she cared so much about the name of a woman who’d died two decades ago and had nothing to do with our family at all.

“I’ll ask her,” I said.

“Don’t.”

“Ivy”

“I mean it, Roman. Don’t.” Edge in her voice that hadn’t been there ten minutes ago on the terrace, back when her hand was still in mine. “Not yet. I want to figure out what that was before your grandmother gets to control the story.”

Didn’t fully understand what she meant. Let it go anyway, because I could see she needed me to, and told myself I’d come back to it later. Didn’t come back to it fast enough. That’s on me. I want that on the record, given everything that happened after.

The next six weeks moved fast. The way things do when you’re too busy managing the optics of your own life to notice what’s happening underneath it.

Dinners. Charity galas. A magazine profile Julian negotiated that ran with a photo of the two of us that made Ivy laugh so hard she nearly choked on her coffee, because apparently I look, quote, “aggressively constipated” in professional photography. An interview with a business outlet where she deflected a reporter’s question about wedding planning so smoothly I nearly forgot it was a deflection. Told her that after, in the car.

“You’re better at this than I am,” I said. “And I’ve done press for a decade.”

“I’ve done damage control my whole life. Different skills. Same muscle.” Said it light, but there was something under it, the way there always seemed to be lately, some door cracked open then shut again before I could see through.

I found myself wanting to see all the way through more than I was comfortable admitting.

That was the strange part, honestly, about those six weeks. Didn’t fall for her in one moment I could point back to and call the beginning. Happened in pieces I didn’t notice adding up. The way she argued with me about everything, actually argued, not the careful pushback people use when they’re managing a superior. Real disagreement. Unimpressed by my title, my money, none of it moved her. The way she called me arrogant to my face at a dinner with two senators sitting right there and somehow made it sound like a compliment. The way she laughed, loud and real, at things nobody else in the room found funny, and the way I started finding reasons to say things just to hear it again.

I noticed I was enjoying our arguments more than I enjoyed most of my actual relationships. Should’ve alarmed me sooner than it did.

The Whitmore Foundation gala was where it stopped being subtle. At least to me.

Usually the kind of event I treated as an obligation. Black tie, donor list a mile long, a room full of people smiling and calculating at the same time. Ivy wore green, some deep emerald that made her look like she belonged in that room more than half the people actually born into it, and when we walked in together, her hand tucked into my arm, something proprietary flared up in my chest that I didn’t examine closely enough. Not then.

Three drinks and one dull speech when a man I vaguely recognized from some hedge fund approached us at the bar, and inside thirty seconds it was obvious he was there for Ivy. Not me.

“Ivy Calder.” Said her name like he was trying it on for size. “Read the profile. Didn’t do you justice, if I’m honest.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“Grant Wellesley.” Didn’t extend a hand to me. Barely acknowledged I was standing there, which I noted with an irritation way out of proportion to the slight. “I’d love to hear more about your business sometime. Dinner, maybe. Professionally, of course.”

“I’m engaged, Mr. Wellesley.”

“Engaged isn’t married.” Smiled like that was clever instead of exactly the kind of thing that makes my jaw lock. “Just dinner. Purely professional.”

“She’s not interested,” I said, before I’d fully decided to say anything.

Wellesley looked at me then. Actually it looked like he’d only just clocked I was a person in this conversation and not furniture. “Didn’t realize fiancés spoke for their fiancées these days.”

“I don’t. She just told you herself.” Came out flatter and colder than I meant it, and I felt Ivy’s grip tighten slightly on my arm. Not pulling away. Steadying. The way you’d brace someone about to do something they’d regret.

“Roman.” Quiet. A warning.

“I’m just agreeing with what she said.”

“You’re glaring at him like he insulted your mother.”

Wellesley made his exit, wisely, with some vague line about catching up later that everyone understood meant never, and I stood there at the bar feeling my own pulse in my ears in a way I hadn’t since I was young enough for feelings like that to be acceptable.

“What was that?” Ivy turned to face me fully once he was gone.

“Nothing. He was being inappropriate.”

“He was being a man at a party hitting on a woman he thought was single enough to try. Not a crime, Roman. That’s Tuesday.” Studied me with a look I couldn’t fully read, somewhere between amused and genuinely curious. “You reacted like he tried to steal something of yours.”

“I reacted like a man protecting the arrangement.”

“Did you.” Quiet. Testing the words like ice, checking if it’d hold before putting her full weight on it. “Because that didn’t look like protecting an arrangement to me. It looked like something else.”

Didn’t have an answer for her. Not one I trusted myself to say out loud in the middle of a gala with three hundred donors and a dozen photographers watching from a respectful distance. So I didn’t answer at all, which was its own kind of answer, and she seemed to get that, because she didn’t push, just held my gaze a moment longer than the moment strictly needed before we both, wordlessly, agreed to drop it for the night.

Neither of us believed the story I’d told her. I could see that on her face as clear as I felt it in my own chest.

Julian found me the next morning in my office. Didn’t knock, the way he does when whatever he’s about to say is bad enough that he’s decided formalities are a waste of everyone’s time.

“We have a problem,” he said.

“With what.”

“The background check.” Set a folder on my desk, thinner than I expected, which somehow made it worse. “Flagged something a while back. The gap in Marguerite Calder’s public record before Ivy’s second birthday. I dismissed it at the time, and figured out an old clerical error. Had someone dig further after your grandmother’s questions at the estate.”

“And.”

“Someone else has already been digging. Recently. Before us.” Tapped the folder. “Someone accessed sealed adoption and relocation records tied to a name close to Calder, about three weeks ago, through a private firm that does exactly one kind of work. The kind rich families hire when they need something buried or something found and don’t want their own name anywhere near the request.”

The chest went tight in a way I didn’t like at all. “Who?.”

“Don’t know yet. The trail’s been scrubbed clean. Whoever did it knew what they were doing.” Julian’s face had none of its usual dry edge to it now. Just something careful, almost cautious, the look he gets right before telling me something he thinks I don’t want to hear. “But Roman. Whoever pulled those records pulled them right around when your family found out about Ivy. Right around when Eleanor asked to meet her early.”

Sat with that a long moment, staring at the folder like it might rearrange itself into something simpler if I looked hard enough.

“One more thing,” Julian said, quieter now. “The records they accessed. Not just about Marguerite Calder disappearing from public view.”

“What are they, then?”

He hesitated, which Julian almost never does, and that hesitation told me more than whatever came next possibly could.

“Sealed family relocation records,” he said. “From this family. Ashford Global’s legal division handled the original paperwork twenty six years ago. Whoever Marguerite Calder was, Roman, our own family’s lawyers were the ones who made sure she disappeared.”