the entry fee for the tournament. She gave it to him. She admitted that to me. But she claimed she didn’t know where the other amounts had come from.”
Bilan wiped her eyes. “I think now she must have been telling the truth. Why else would she have come and convinced me to go to the bank with her? But at the time, I couldn’t see that. I needed to blame someone for my son’s death. For taking him from me. I’d lost him so many times. To fighting. To manhood. To American culture.”
Bilan sat down again and slowly began replacing the hand wraps in the drawer. Nora couldn’t fathom it. She couldn’t see the bottom of Bilan’s grief and something deep in her gut clenched at the thought of holding Henry’s clothes in an empty room, of having nothing left of him but fabric and memories. She’d never written him a letter like this, telling him how much she believed in him. She’d never told him she kept her distance because she hadn’t wanted him to hurt like she’d been hurt, but maybe she’d just hurt him in other ways.
Bilan closed the drawer and stood, blinking. “I made Logan wait outside the bank while I closed Aaden’s account. He had almost twenty-seven thousand dollars saved. It wasn’t just the strange deposits. He’d planned to buy a new cooler for the store.”
She wiped her eyes and moved back into the hallway, shutting the door to his room. “I put the money in one of Aaden’s duffel bags, the first one I’d bought him when he began going to Strike, and I gave it to Logan. I wanted it all to go away, the money, the accusations and rumors, and her, too—everything she’d brought into our lives.”
“You put twenty-seven thousand dollars in cash in a duffel bag and handed it to Logan Russo?”
“Yes, the one you showed me in the picture. That was Aaden’s. If I hadn’t bought him that bag, if I hadn’t let him go to Strike that first time …”
She couldn’t finish the sentence and Nora didn’t know how to finish it for her. She tried to give Bilan the deposit slip and letter back, but the older woman shook her head as she locked up the apartment.
Once she was back on the street, Nora looked at the scrawled handwriting and then turned toward the downtown skyline.
She needed to find Logan Russo.
* * *
The stadium was ringed with crowds, people flowing in and out of the giant glass entrance to the Strike Down exhibition.
“Logan is here.” One of Nora’s analysts met her at the doors. “She’s in the press box with the rest of the managers. We should be able to intercept her between that and her fan meet and greet, unless you want to interrupt their meeting?”
“No. That’s fine. Let me know as soon as they adjourn.” Nora melted into the crowd on the stadium floor. She needed time to process everything she’d just learned.
The duffel bag had belonged to Aaden. Bilan gave it to Logan, stuffed with cash, and somehow the bag had turned up in her partner’s closet, while stacks of bills were hidden in his desk drawer.
She hadn’t known how Corbett could be connected to Logan. Her knee-jerk response—in all her shortsightedness and jealousy—had been to imagine an affair, but it was money. Of course. Everything boiled down to money. Money was why Sam White had killed himself. Money was why her parents disowned her. Money was the reason Mike put up with an unfeeling wife. People killed for money. People died for it. Love might hurt, but money would strike you down forever.
Logan had paid Corbett, had given him a bag full of Aaden’s money, but why? Had he helped Logan commit the fraud? Logan couldn’t have passed the duffel bag on until after Aaden was dead, when the refunds were already pouring into the fake account. The timeline didn’t make sense.
Then there was the problem of Logan asking Bilan to go to the bank. Why would she be checking security camera footage if she’d given Aaden the bribes in the first place? To make sure she hadn’t appeared on camera? Why go to all that trouble when the email itself hadn’t even been deleted off the server? It didn’t add up, and maybe Nora was awful at everything else in her life, but she knew how to add.
Even the letter to Aaden was maddeningly ambiguous. In the moment it had sounded like a