I sat back against the butter-soft leather of the limo, watching the busy city pass by soundlessly through the tinted window. It still struck me how quietly rich everything in Cal’s world was. Theseats didn’t squeak. The doors didn’t slam. Even the ice in the minibar melted like it had manners.
I wasn’t new to it anymore. The money thing. Not really. But I still had the lingering sense that at any minute someone was going to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Sir, we’ve found your real life, it’s parked out back behind a laundromat.”
Cal sat beside me, relaxed in a navy suit and the tie I’d picked out for him, scrolling through his phone. No posturing. No cufflink-adjusting billionaire theatrics. He looked like a man on his way to dinner. A really good dinner. AtPer Se.
“You okay?” he asked, without looking up.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Liar.”
I shrugged. “I’m just… recalibrating. Dinner with Hal is hard work. He doesn’t join conversations—he commandeers them. Like a yacht. Or a small country. Not to mention the fact that every time he walks into the room all I can hear in my head is Right Said Fred singing ‘I’m Too Sexy For My Shirt.’”
Cal chuckled, finally glancing at me. “Well, if it makes any difference, Hal likes you.”
“I don’t think he does. I don’t think he even knows my name.”
Cal leaned over and kissed me. “Just breathe. It’s only dinner.” He smiled and tapped his phone. “I need to check in with Rashida. She’s got updates.”
He hit speaker.
“Talk to me,” came Rashida’s voice. Crisp, clipped, and always three steps ahead of everyone. “Are you on your way to dinner?”
“Yeah,” Cal said. “You got a minute to fill me in on things?”
“For you? Always. For Hal? Less so. I’ve had twelve alerts today that he’s trying to buy an extinct volcano. If that doesn’t give you Bond villain vibes I don’t know what does.”
“He’s not a Bond villain,” Cal said. “He’s just…”
“A weird billionaire. Seems to me there’s a lot of them thesedays. I’m just gladyou’vegot your feet planted firmly on the ground.”
Cal rubbed my hand. “I’ve got a very down-to-earth husband who makes certain of that.”
“And may I say,” Rashida continued. “Thank God for him. If it weren’t for Matt, we’d all be attending Hal’s underwater gala in a volcano lair, clinking glasses with crypto bros while robotic piranhas circled the moat.”
“Rashida,” Cal said with a chuckle. “The update?”
“Right,” she said, shifting gears. “Okay. Well. That land Hal’s interested in, the three thousand acres in Maui? It’s complicated. There are old trusts, cultural claims, and some disputed inheritance lines that go back generations. Cal, there’s history there. Real history. Family connections. The kind of thing you can’t bulldoze for infinity pools, no matter how exclusive the guest list is.”
“Does Hal know this?” Cal asked quietly. “How much does he know?”
“Not a lot, if you ask me,” Rashida said. “And at this stage, nothing’s concrete—both literally or figuratively. There’s still a whole lot of paperwork going up and down that chain. But while Hal sees a beach, I see a chessboard. And if he moves too fast, he’s going to step on something sacred. Maybe someonesacred.”
Cal’s brow furrowed. “You’re saying we need to tread carefully.”
“I’m saying this could blow up, Cal. Not just in the press, but in ways that matter more than your bottom line.”
There was a pause. Not defensive, just thoughtful. Cal’s fingers tapped lightly against the leather seat, the way they always did when he was running numbers in his head. Except this wasn’t just about numbers.
“I hear you,” he said at last. “But we don’t have enough to go on yet. You said it yourself—nothing’s concrete.”
“Yet,” Rashida warned.
“I’m not bulldozing anything,” Cal said calmly. “But Hal’s proposal makes sense on paper. The resort would bring serious revenue to the island, create jobs, and elevate the Croft Foundation’s portfolio in the Pacific. If there’s a cultural complication, then we’ll figure that out. Respectfully. But I can’t just walk away because theremightbe a story buried under the sand.”
I stayed quiet, which for me is historic. My gut didn’t like the wordelevate, but this wasn’t the moment to unpack it.
“Let me dig further,” Rashida said. “I’ll get you more than speculation.”
