Page 29 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"What do you think it was? The personal matter."

"I don't know."

"Guess."

He shakes his head. "I don't guess about my family. Guessing is how you build a story that feels true and isn't. I know my father had a secret. I know your father found it. I know Ezra is protecting it. Beyond that, I've got nothing."

I believe him. Not because he's trustworthy—I don't know him well enough for trust—but because the frustration in his voice is real. He's a man who left his family over a locked door and has spent seven years on the other side of it, unable to stop wondering what's behind it.

"Your father's death," I say. "The cancer. It was fast."

"Faster than anyone expected. Diagnosed March, dead June."

"Did that seem right to you?"

Another long pause. "I've thought about it. Pancreatic cancer is aggressive. The timeline wasn't impossible. Just... efficient."

"Efficient."

"My father was a man who generated problems for people. When he died, a lot of those problems went away. Drawyour own conclusions." He looks at me steadily. "But I can't give you what I don't have. I don't have proof of anything. I have a dead father, a brother who won't talk, and a teaching job in Maine. That's the full inventory."

I finish the whiskey. We sit in silence for a minute, watching the harbor. The fishing boats are tied up now, rocking gently in the dark water.

"One more question," I say. "Your other brothers. Malachi, Lazarus. Do they know what you know?"

"Malachi follows Ezra. Always has. If Ezra says a door is closed, Malachi doesn't knock." He pauses. "Lazarus is different. Lazarus watches. Listens. Collects things. I've never known what he knows, because Lazarus doesn't share. He just... accumulates."

"Could he know more than you?"

"Lazarus could know everything. Or nothing. That's the problem with him—you can't tell. He's the only one of us I could never read."

He stands. Puts money on the table. Looks down at me.

"Go home, Benedict. Whatever this is, it's been buried for twelve years. The people who buried it are still alive, and they're better at this than you are."

"You don't know what I'm good at."

"No. But I know what my family is good at. And I know that asking questions about dead patriarchs is the kind of hobby that makes you one." He pulls on his jacket. "I left because staying would have killed me—not metaphorically. I'd like to go on living. I hope you'd like the same."

He walks out. I watch him through the window—crossing the parking lot, getting into a ten-year-old Subaru, driving away. A St. Croix in a Subaru. The exile made flesh.

I sit in the booth for another twenty minutes, drinking coffee, letting the conversation settle. Writing nothing down—everything stored, filed, cross-referenced with what I already know. My father's personal secret. Edward's discovery. Ezra's locked door. The monthly payments to a ghost. The too-fast cancer.

The shape is forming. I can feel it—not complete, not legible, but present. Like a figure behind frosted glass. Something is there. Someone is there. A presence in the St. Croix family history that everyone can feel and nobody will name.

***

I-95 south. Dark now. Headlights cutting through the nothing between Portland and New York. Four hours of highway and my own thoughts and the particular loneliness of driving alone at night with a head full of dead men and their secrets.

I check my phone at a rest stop in Massachusetts. No reply from Lucy. The two texts sit on the screen—Tight hallways in that buildingandYou didn't call me Benedict—unanswered, unacknowledged, floating in the digital silence like messages in bottles that may or may not have washed ashore.

She didn't reply. She also didn't block me. Didn't text backdon't contact me.Didn't do any of the things a woman who wants it to stop would do. The silence is its own language, and I'm learning to read it.

I type a third text. Send it without hesitating.

I drove four hours today thinking about the way you wouldn't say my name.

I put the phone away. Drive south. The highway unspools in front of me, dark and straight, and I think about Gideon's warning—go home, the people who buried this are better at this than you—and I think about Lucy's silence, which is louder than any answer she could give, and I think about the shape behind the frosted glass, the figure in the St. Croix history that's starting to resolve into something with edges and weight.