Page 74 of Carry on Wayward Son

Edmund Ashmore’s holdings were substantial and complex, built over decades to look like exactly what they were—old money carefully stewarded, real estate and finance, and the philanthropic apparatus that came with names on buildings. Legitimate. Visible. The architecture of a family that understood the best cover was simply having enough real activity that nothing stood out.

My father’s name appeared in the fourth document.

Then the sixth.

Three times in the seventh.

Professional connections—overlapping board memberships, development projects where John Hollingsworth’s capital had moved alongside Ashmore money, a real estate venture along the North Carolina coast from eight years ago with both their names in the filing documents.

I kept scrolling.

Halston Ashmore appeared in two of the more recent documents. One from four years ago. One from eighteen months ago. Both showing direct professional connections to my father, not through overlapping boards but through a shared LLC, registered in Delaware eighteen months ago, with both their names as managing members.

I stood on the deck in the December cold and looked out at the Atlantic as that sank in.

My father and the senior Ashmore in business wasn’t a surprise. Old money tended to attract old money. But the thing with Halston Ashmore a year and a half ago? Yeah, I was gonna need Dax to pull that shared LLC apart before I understood what it actually was. This was the public layer. Dax had said himself it was what you found moving fast across the right databases. Underneath was another layer, and probably another beneath that, and he was still digging.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Halston was just stepping up now that his own father was aging. I didn’t know enough yet. All I had were professional connections between my father and the Ashmore family, some predating Halston’s graduation by years and some very recent. And on their heels, a question getting louder about a man I’d thought I understood and apparently hadn’t.

Was our father even worse than I had imagined?

I wouldn’t tell Willa yet. Not until I had something more than connections on paper, not until Dax came back with what was underneath and I understood what I was actually looking at. She was in there making pancakes on Christmas morning with Sawyer and Layla and the ridiculous tree she’d decorated exactly how she wanted, and I was not going to blow that up unless and until I had something real to blow it up with. Suspicions weren’t sufficient, and she’d been through enough.

I closed the app and put my phone in my pocket.

Through the window, Willa laughed at something Sawyer had done with the batter. Layla leaned against the counter with her coffee mug in both hands, her hair still loose around her shoulders, watching them with an expression somewhere between gratitude and grief and something else she hadn’t named yet.

I went inside.

“You’re on fruit,” Sawyer said, pointing at me, and handed me a cutting board and a knife.

Understanding my role here, I got to work.

Thirty-Eight

LAYLA

The house didn’t fit the island.

Most of the homes on Hatterwick were built with practical, barrier-island construction—everything elevated on pilings, built low and sturdy against weather that arrived with opinions, with weathered clapboard and metal roofs and the general understanding that the island would have its way with whatever you put on it, and you might as well account for that from the start. Even the larger vacation homes held the modesty of people who understood the ocean was in charge.

This house had not gotten the memo.

A modern monstrosity of glass and steel, it was built to a scale reading as a statement, elevated on pilings like everything else but the pilings themselves were somehow architectural, lit from below and incorporated into the design so the whole structure seemed to float above the dune. The damned thing probably cost more to build than the rest of the block combined and was definitely designed by someone who’d never wintered here and didn’t intend to. Someone who wasn’t concerned if Mother Nature pitched a tantrum and washed it into the ocean because they had enough money to build something all over again.

I didn’t recognize it from before. Not that I’d registered every big house I’d seen the last time I’d been here, but I would’ve remembered the wrongness of the style next to the pastel jewels marching along the coast.

The edgy quiet on the drive over was a far cry from the comfortable working silence we’d developed over weeks of sitting across tables from each other. I understood Jace’s relationship with his dad was complicated, so I let him have the silence. Let him armor up in whatever way he needed to get through this party.

When we parked and got out, he offered his arm without comment. I slipped my hand through the crook of his elbow and offered a squeeze of encouragement before we went up the stairs.

Inside, the party was already going full tilt.

The wide, lavish rooms had been arranged with the obvious intention of illustrating that cost was not a consideration. Bar service moved through the crowd with the silent efficiency of a staff paid well to be invisible, a pianist in the far corner played jazz calibrated to fade into the background without competing with conversation, flowers that had come a hell of a lot further than the mainland were arranged in low centerpieces on every surface.

The guests were exactly what you’d expect of a house like this.

I’d always hated this kind of room. Not because I didn’t understand it—I understood it far better than I ever wanted to—but because of what I understood. These were the rooms where the men who funded operations like the one that took every girl who wouldn’t be missed moved through the world openly and easily and without consequence. They didn’t think of themselves as those men. That was the thing. They’d long since separated the money from what the money did, the way you separated the hand signing a check from whatever the check paid for. They believed at some cellular level that the world was divided into people who mattered and people who were available. Never once had they questioned that division or which side of it they fell on.