Page 63 of Carry on Wayward Son

“Miles.” I kept my voice quiet. “Don’t you want to do something to make up for what happened to Gwen?”

The flatness broke.

Just for a moment. A crack in the wall he’d spent years building, and in that crack I saw what was underneath—the grief, the guilt, the college kid who’d stood in front of his family’s marina and told someone to go to hell, then spent the rest of his life living with the cost of being right about his refusal and still being wrong about what would happen.

His gaze moved across all three of us, settling on Layla at the end of the table one more time, something in it that I still couldn’t fully read.

“I’d do anything to undo all of it.” His voice had dropped to something that wasn’t the careful neutral of the past forty minutes. “Anything in the world. But I’m not willing to risk anyone else in my family to do it. So I’ll live with my guilt.”

He shoved back from the table and stood. “Guard. Take me back to my cell.”

He shuffled out. The door closed. The camera in the corner kept its steady blink.

I sat in the silence for a moment and let the full weight of leaving with nothing settle on me. Forty minutes of careful, patient work, and Miles Busby had given us exactly what he’d decided to give us when he walked through the door, which was nothing actionable, and he’d done it with the competence of a man who’d had a long time to prepare.

Rios stood first. Layla stood. We processed back through the gates in silence, gate by gate, the doors opening and closing around us. We retrieved our things from the lockers and walked out into the flat gray of a December afternoon that had nothing to offer.

Thirty-Two

LAYLA

I wondered how many podcast listeners understood exactly how mind-numbingly boring and unglamorous most investigative work was. They got the streamlined episodes, edited for peak engagement value, and had absolutely no clue that I spent most of my time up to my elbows in records—digital or otherwise.

The week after the prison visit, Jace and I spent hours cross-referencing property records, corporate filings, and county tax rolls, looking for patterns in data that wasn’t organized to be found. We were widening the net, moving beyond the marina and the businesses we’d already identified, and into the broader question of who owned what on Hatterwick and through which entities.

It was arduous work. The kind of thing that might or might not be important, and we wouldn’t know which until we finished. The only thing saving us from death by monotony were our sparring sessions at the gym. Well, and everything that inevitably led to back at my place.

He’d been staying over since the incident at the animal shelter. Neither of us had commented on it. He wasn’t making a thing of it. He just… took up space in my bed and kept the nightmares mostly away. As if he’d always been there.

I was making a concerted effort not to think about how easy that felt or what it would do to me when this thing we were doing was over. For now, I would take the pleasure and companionship and do the job I’d come here to do.

A lot of the properties we’d covered were vacation homes. The island had accumulated them over decades—mainland money buying up parcels, building houses that sat empty nine months of the year and got rented out to corporate retreat groups the other three. Each property had its own trail of LLCs and holding companies, its own registered agents, its own chain of ownership that had to be traced back to a person before it meant anything. Most of them traced back to entirely unremarkable people, with entirely unremarkable amounts of money, who had decided that a barrier island property was a reasonable place to park it.

Jace sat across the coffee table from me, laptop open, a fourth cup of coffee cooling at his elbow. Koa was stretched out at my feet. Outside the cottage windows, the afternoon had gone gray and still.

“Aldrich family trust,” he said without looking up. “Three properties on the Atlantic side. Held since the eighties.”

“Clean?”

“As far as I can tell.” He typed something. “Cedar Shore Properties LLC. Single member, Raleigh law firm as registered agent, not Calloway and Pierce.”

I ran it through the Secretary of State’s database. “Registered 2019. Probably nothing, but worth keeping.”

“Agreed.” He scrolled. “Coastal Heritage Group. Six properties.”

The trail on that one took longer. A series of nested LLCs that eventually resolved to a family office in Charlotte, with nothing connecting to anything we already had. I added it to the list and moved on. This was the work. Not dramatic, not revelatory. The actual body of it was hours of tedious cross-referencing that mostly produced nothing and occasionally produced a thread worth pulling.

“Ashmore Holdings,” Jace said.

I looked up. He was frowning at the screen with the mild interest of someone who’d found something slightly unexpected.

“Property on the Atlantic side, just south of Osprey Beach. Acquired twenty years ago.” He turned the laptop so I could see. “Ashmore Holdings LLC. Registered in Virginia.”

I ran it. The LLC was clean, the annual filings current, with no connection to Calloway and Pierce or any of the other entities we’d been tracking. “You recognize the name?”

“The Ashmores are old money. High muckity-mucks all up and down the coast. Real estate, finance, the kind of family that has buildings named after them at universities.” He leaned back. “I knew the younger one in college. He was a prick.” He said it the way you said something that had stopped being worth energy years ago. “That was a long time ago. Didn’t know they had connections here.”

I added it to the list. Another thread to check, another name to run against everything else we had. Whether it connected to anything or dead-ended like most of the others remained to be seen.