Harlow Meridian
The footstep in the hallway never resolved into a person — thirty seconds of silence, then nothing, and Isabel decided fear was a luxury she didn't have time for. She photographed nine pages of the folder with shaking hands, put it back exactly as she'd found it, and was back in the guest wing before the house clock struck one.
Harlow Meridian Trust took Camille's cousin two days this time, and cost four hundred dollars Isabel didn't tell Sebastian she'd taken from the joint household account he'd insisted on opening early, "so you get comfortable with how we do things."
The trust was three years old. Registered in a neighboring state. Funded, as far as the cousin could trace through public filings, by wire transfers that matched — almost to the dollar — money that had left various Kade family accounts around the same time debts were supposedly swallowing the estate whole.
Isabel read it twice, then a third time, and arrived somewhere between two possible stories.
One: Josephine Kade was quietly bleeding the family dry into a private account before the whole thing collapsed, protecting herself while her grandson inherited nothing but debt and a good name.
Two — and this one made Isabel's pulse do something strange — Josephine was building something. Rebuilding something. And nobody in that house knew but her.
Either way, it was a secret. Either way, it was leverage. Isabel had spent eight months learning exactly how much the Kade name mattered to Sebastian, how much it would cost him — reputation, pride, the museum board seat he'd been promised since childhood — to have either version of that story printed anywhere at all.
She was drafting the shape of a conversation in her head, something that started with I only want what's fair, when Perry Nash found her on the terrace the next morning, alone, coffee gone cold in her hand.
He didn't ask what she'd been doing. He didn't mention the folder, the trust, or the study.
"You worked at a gallery in the city, before this," he said instead, settling into the chair across from her without being invited. "Kessler Fine Arts. Fired eleven months ago. Interesting circumstances, from what I found."
Isabel's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.
"I do background checks on everyone who gets close to this family, Miss Marchetti," Perry said pleasantly. "It's rather thorough. Mrs. Kade insists on it."
"How thorough," Isabel managed.
Perry Nash smiled for the first time since she'd met him, and it was the least reassuring thing she'd seen all week.
"Thorough enough," he said, "that I don't think you're half as surprised by that trust as you're pretending to be."