About your father

“We need to talk about your father.”

I stared at the text until the letters blurred, standing in the middle of the coffee shop with Xavier still watching me from across the table, his hand still half raised from where he’d been reaching for his cup.

“Kara.” His voice cut through the ringing in my ears. “What is it?”

“Jeremy.” I turned the phone so he could see it, my hand not quite steady anymore. “He knows something.”

Xavier read it twice. Something shifted behind his eyes, quick and sharp, gone before I could name it.

“Don’t go,” he said.

“I have to.”

“You don’t have to do anything.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping low, urgent, the same voice from the ballroom three days ago that still lived somewhere under my skin. “Not tonight. Not until we know what he’s planning.”

“He’s my husband, Xavier. If I don’t go home, he’ll wonder why.”

“Let him wonder.”

I almost laughed, except nothing about this felt funny. “You don’t understand. Everything I’ve built today, the trust, Ashford, all of it, it only works if Jeremy still believes I’m the same woman he married. The second I stop coming home, he’ll know something changed.”

Xavier’s jaw tightened, that same stillness from the hospital settling over him, a man calculating something he didn’t like the shape of.

“Then I’m driving you,” he said. “I’m not letting you walk into that house alone after a text like that.”

I wanted to argue. I didn’t have it in me.

The drive took eleven minutes. I know because I counted every single one of them, staring out the window at streetlights blurring past, my hand resting on the door handle like I might need to bolt at any second.

“Whatever he says in there,” Xavier said, pulling up two houses down from the penthouse, engine still running, “you call me. The second it feels wrong. I don’t care what time it is.”

“I will.”

He caught my wrist before I could open the door. Just that. His thumb pressed once against my pulse point, gentle, like he was checking it was still there.

“I mean it, Kara.” His eyes held mine, dark and steady in the dashboard light. “I’ve already lost you once. I’m not doing it again.”

The words hit me somewhere low in my chest, somewhere I hadn’t let anyone reach in longer than I could remember. I didn’t have time to ask what he meant by lost me once, not with Jeremy’s text still glowing on my screen, not with my whole body running on borrowed courage.

“I’ll call you,” I said, and got out before I did something reckless, like asking him to finish that sentence.

The penthouse lights were on when I walked in. Jeremy stood by the window, a glass of something amber in his hand, and he didn’t turn around when the door clicked shut behind me.

“You said we needed to talk about my father.” My voice came out steadier than I felt.

“Sit down, Kara.”

“I’ll stand.”

He turned then, and the look on his face stopped my heart cold. Not anger. Not suspicion. Something closer to pity, and pity from Jeremy had never once meant anything good.

“I got a call today,” he said. “From my mother.”

My stomach dropped straight through the floor.

“What about?”

“She heard you went to see a lawyer this afternoon.” He set the glass down on the windowsill with a soft, deliberate click. “Ashford and Voss. Ringing any bells?”

The room went very quiet. My pulse roared in my ears loud enough that I almost missed what he said next.

“I know who your father was, Kara.” His voice had gone flat, careful, the voice of a man choosing every word before he let it loose. “I’ve known for a while now. Longer than you’d probably like.”

“Then tell me.” My hands curled into fists at my sides. “Tell me who he was.”

Jeremy crossed the room slowly, close enough that I could smell the whiskey on his breath, close enough that two years ago I would have leaned into him without thinking twice.

“Your father wasn’t just some man who died in an accident,” he said quietly. “He was in business with my father. Real business. The kind that built half of what my family owns today.”

The floor tilted under me the way it always did right before my life rearranged itself without asking permission.

“That’s not possible. My father died when I was a baby. I don’t even have memories of him.”

“That’s exactly how my mother wanted it.” Jeremy’s eyes didn’t leave my face, watching every flicker of shock cross it like he was cataloguing evidence. “Your father found out something about my father’s business that he shouldn’t have. Something that would have destroyed my family if it ever got out.”

My mouth had gone completely dry. “What are you saying?”

Jeremy reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, worn soft at the creases like it had been carried and unfolded many times before tonight.

“I’m saying the accident that killed your parents wasn’t an accident at all.” He held the paper out to me, his hand steady even as something raw and unreadable moved behind his eyes. “And I’m saying my mother is the one who arranged it.”

I stared at the paper in his outstretched hand, my whole body gone cold, and didn’t move to take it.

“Read it,” he said. “Before she finds out I showed you.”