Chapter 11: Fine Print

Grant's POV

There were nine hundred and forty emails in the folder labeled LEDGER.

I had never needed to search it before. It was nine o'clock on Friday night, and I sat at the desk with my laptop open and my hand on the trackpad, afraid to click.

The study door squeaked. It had squeaked since the day we moved in. I kept meaning to have it fixed.

"Grant?"

Tatum leaned in the doorway in a pink silk robe, a thick baby-name book hugged against her stomach. She had moved in last Saturday with eleven suitcases, the morning after my mother announced the baby at dinner. Twenty-six, beautiful, and she never stopped talking.

"I've got it down to two. Hudson or Beau. Beau Ellison." She tilted her head. "Doesn't that sound like a senator?"

"It sounds fine."

"Just fine?" She crossed the room and sat on the arm of my chair. Her perfume was sweet and heavy. "You're still upset about the hearing."

"I'm working."

"Sloane says it wasn't your fault. She says the lawyers should have caught it." She ran her fingers through the back of my hair. "Come to bed."

"Soon."

She sighed and stood. At the door she turned, still smiling, but the smile had gotten small. "We could name him after your father."

"No."

The door squeaked shut behind her.

I clicked the oldest email.

It had arrived five years ago, the month the company nearly went under. The bank had given us thirty days. My father had been dead eight months and every man on the board was waiting for me to fail. Then a message came from an address I didn't know. It explained, in plain words, exactly how to save Ellison Group. It named the one clause in our bank loan that could buy us another year.

I followed it, and it worked. I told the board I had found that clause myself.

At the bottom were four words.

Read the fine print.

I opened the next one. Same four words. And the next. I had seen that line nine hundred and forty times. I had never once heard it.

I scrolled back up and read down the column of send times, the column I had never looked at.

2:58 a.m. 3:04 a.m. 3:11 a.m. 2:47 a.m. 3:15 a.m. 3:02 a.m.

The times kept coming. Nearly every email Ledger had sent me arrived within half an hour of three in the morning. The pattern had been on my screen for years.

I sat back.

I remembered waking at night and reaching across the bed to find it empty. I remembered the thin line of light under the kitchen door. Juno on a stool at the counter in one of my old shirts, tea going cold beside her, that ugly silver laptop open in front of her.

Couldn't sleep, she would say, and shut the lid when I walked in.

I never asked why. I went back to bed and forgot it by morning.

There was a breakfast I remembered now, three years back. A Sunday. Owen had sent over contracts and I was signing them at the kitchen table between bites of toast. Juno stood at the stove with her back to me.

"Read the fine print, Grant," she'd said.

I laughed. "That's what I pay lawyers for."

She didn't laugh. She turned off the stove and put my eggs on a plate.

That same week, Ledger won us Calder Street.

I got up and went to the window. Across the street a man walked a small wet dog. I watched him until he turned the corner.

It was impossible. Juno had quit law school. Juno had sat at one dinner with my partners, and I couldn't remember a word she'd said. I had told her she wasn't built for rooms like that, and she hadn't argued.

But she had been first in her class. A professor had said so at our wedding, an old man with a loud laugh. I had been talking to my mother, and I hadn't listened.

Sloane's man had told me Juno went into Sayer Capital at nine on Monday and was still inside at half past eight that night. Twelve hours, on her first day, in a building full of people who worked for the man who hated me most.

And on Tuesday, in front of Sayer's whole staff, she had told me I lost Brooks because I didn't read page nine. I had sent that contract to one person.

I had never once asked my wife what she did with her days.

The glass was cold under my hand.

I went back to the desk and opened the payments file. Every month for years I had paid Ledger from my private account through a small company called Northline Advisory. It never touched the company's books. I had set it up that way myself, so the board would never see how much I leaned on an adviser I'd never met. Six million, two hundred thousand dollars.

I had never asked who owned Northline. I had never asked Ledger's name. I had never asked my wife why she was awake.

I had never asked anyone anything.

I opened my phone. The hearing was already on every news site. The top photo had been taken on the courthouse steps: Juno with her chin up and rain in her hair, Ronan Sayer's hand on her back.

The caption said, Sayer's new right hand. The first comment said, Who is she? Somebody find out who she is. It had forty thousand likes.

I scrolled back to our last anniversary, the one my mother's photographer had shot. Mother, me, Sloane, a toast. I enlarged it. Juno stood at the very edge of the frame, half cropped out, holding a tray of glasses somebody had handed her.

I went through ten years of family photos. She was at the edge in every one of them.

Nobody had pushed her there. I just never once stepped aside to make room.

Around eleven, I heard Tatum come down for water. She stopped outside the study. Then she went back up. I didn't call out.

Just after midnight, I texted her. When is your next scan? I'll come with you.

She answered within seconds.

Tatum: Oh, you don't have to! Sloane's taking me. Go to sleep, baby.

I didn't go to sleep. I read Ledger's emails one by one, in order. By four o'clock I could hear Juno's voice in them. Short sentences. No wasted words. The one line that mattered always came first.

By six, the window had gone from black to gray and the rain had stopped. My coffee had been cold for hours. Her tea used to go cold beside her, too.

I had no proof. I had four words and a list of times.

At a quarter to nine on Saturday morning, I opened a new email and typed Ledger's address. I left the subject line empty. I typed one word.

Juno?

I almost deleted it.

Then I pressed send.