The Other Ledger
Forty-one million in debt. Liens on two of the three estates. The museum board seat was ceremonial — a donation from decades ago, paid off in installments the family could no longer make. The shipping company had been sold off in pieces since Sebastian was in college, quietly enough that the society pages never noticed, because the society pages only ever wrote about the Kades' triumphs, and someone — Isabel now understood exactly who — had made very sure it stayed that way.
She sat with the numbers for a long time.
Eight months. Eight months of dinners, of learning which fork mattered, of laughing at Sebastian's terrible golf jokes, of imagining a life that had just evaporated on a phone screen in a parked car.
She could leave. Tonight, even — pack the one bag she'd brought, invent a family emergency, be gone before the engagement announcement hit the papers Sunday.
Except.
Except a woman didn't spend eight months building a life for nothing, and Isabel Marchetti had never once in her adult life walked away from a room empty-handed. There would be a settlement, if she played the breakup right. There would be gifts already given that no lawyer would ask her to return over something as ugly as a broken engagement. And there was still the ring on her finger, worth more than the sum should exist inside a family forty-one million in the hole.
Something didn't add up. A family that broke didn't buy four-hundred-thousand-dollar rings.
Which meant somewhere in Kade Hall, money was moving that Perry Nash's ledger didn't show.
She waited until the house went quiet, past midnight, and let herself into Josephine's private sitting room on the second floor — a room she'd been told, twice, was off-limits to guests, which in Isabel's experience only ever meant it was the room worth entering.
The desk here was locked. The bookshelf wasn't.
Behind a row of leather-bound novels no one had opened in years, Isabel's fingers found a slim folder, unmarked, tucked flat against the back panel like it had been hidden rather than filed. She drew it out with her heart going hard against her ribs and opened it under the thin light of her phone.
Wire transfers. Dozens of them, going back three years, moving six and seven figures into an account under a name she'd never heard anywhere in this house.
Harlow Meridian Trust.
Isabel stared at the name until it stopped looking like letters, and somewhere down the hall, a floorboard creaked under a weight that was absolutely not hers.