POV: Jasmine
I climbed off his lap and reached for my phone.
Liam sat up beside me, running a hand through his hair, watching my face with the patient attention he brought when he was deciding whether to ask or wait.
I texted Nora: I'm listening.
The three dots appeared immediately. Then, instead of a message, my phone rang.
I put her on speaker and set it on the coffee table between us.
"Leo told me something tonight," Nora said. Her voice was steady — careful and direct, the way she spoke when she was carrying something she had thought about for a while before deciding to say.
"A few weeks ago, a man came to the ranch."
I did not move.
"He told Martha he used to know your biological father." A pause. "Not know of him. Know him. He said the motel story — the overdose, the way Carol told it — was not the full picture."
The apartment was very quiet.
Carol. The name moved through me like smoke, touching everything without settling anywhere. Carol, who had kept her hands clean of the details she did not want asked about. Carol, who had delivered the information about our father's death the way she delivered most information — efficiently, without invitation for follow-up.
"Leo sent the man away," Nora continued. "He didn't engage, didn't take his name, didn't ask questions he wasn't ready to answer. He told me the same night and asked me to hold it because he didn't want to put it on you until he knew whether it mattered — until he had something more than a stranger at a gate."
Another pause, smaller. "I'm telling you now because I think you have the right to know. And because I'm not going to start something with your brother by keeping secrets from his sister."
The word start sat in the room for a moment. I did not touch it.
"Thank you," I said. "I'll call you back."
I ended the call. I set the phone face-down on the table. I sat beside Liam on the couch and let the information arrange itself at whatever speed it needed to. There was no use in trying to accelerate it.
A man had come to the ranch. The motel story was not the full picture.
Liam did not fill the silence. He knew better, and he knew me well enough to understand that the stillness was not absence but the internal movement of a person sorting through what had just arrived and deciding where to put it. He sat beside me, not tense, just present — the quality of attention he saved for things that mattered.
"Leo gave me a folder," I said.
My own voice surprised me — how even it was, how deliberately I was choosing each word, laying them down one at a time.
"At the end of last year. A name, a place, a date. None of it matched the overdose. None of it matched the motel outside Atlantic City."
I looked at my hands in my lap. "I put it in my desk drawer. I told myself I would look at it when I was ready. I have not been ready."
Liam was very still beside me.
"And now a man has walked up to the ranch," I said, "claiming to know him. Which means people are moving around my father's story from directions I did not expect."
I felt it then — the pull of the folder, the weight of information you have been circling without approaching. I knew the shape of what was in it without having opened it.
I knew what it would reorganise if I let it. I knew that whatever the man at the ranch had said to Martha, it had come from somewhere real — had been held for long enough that someone had bothered to make the drive.
Your father did not end the way Carol told you.
I sat with that for a long moment. Then I looked at Liam.
"I'm not opening the folder this week." I said it plainly, without hedging. "Aurora just came through a fever. Asher has asked us to give him space and I intend to respect that."
"I am not going to chase this tonight, or tomorrow, or the day after. I have enough on this table right now."
I folded my hands in my lap. "I am going to hold the folder and wait for the next piece to come to me. Something is moving. When it is ready to arrive, it will."
Liam looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached over and took my hand, and the warmth of his palm against mine was the most uncomplicated thing that had happened in the last hour.
"Okay," he said.
His phone buzzed on the coffee table.
He picked it up. The watchlist notification — the one he had set years ago for names that mattered to the company, to the family, to the circle of people whose movements affected theirs. His eyes moved across the screen. Then back. Then across again.
He turned the phone toward me without speaking.
The alert was brief. Jackson Blackwood had resigned from the boards of two companies. Sources close to him indicated he was preparing a public statement.
I read it twice. Then a third time, slower.
The folder in the desk drawer. The man at the ranch. Asher's hand shaking around a glass of water.
And now Jackson — who did not resign from anything voluntarily, who treated board seats as things that kept him alive — stepping back from two of them and preparing to say something to the world.
Everything was moving at once, from directions that had nothing to do with each other and everything to do with each other, and I did not yet have the full shape of it.
I looked at Liam over the screen of his phone and he looked back at me, and neither of us said anything, because we were both thinking the same thing and neither of us was ready to say it out loud yet.