Miriam looked at her helplessly. “What are our other choices?”

“Cole, do you want to invest a half million dollars in a failing business that we may or may not still have a year from now?” Hannah asked.

Cole looked down at the table. “I would love to. If I had the money. Which…I don’t,” he admitted, not looking up.

Miriam blinked at him, and Noelle felt her shock in the lines of her body. “You don’t…what?”

“I don’t have access to my trust fund until I’m forty,” Cole said, carefully, seeming to choose his words with a great deal more care than he normally did. “There was an incident when I was seventeen, and the terms were changed. My parents also refused to pay for any of my college expenses, and I hadn’t saved anything, because, you know, outrageously rich.” He squirmed under the stares of everyone at the table. “I lived off student loans, and now my income mostly goes toward paying just enough of them to stay afloat.”

“So this whole rich boy brand you have going on is…?” Miriam prompted.

“My parents financing just enough of my lifestyle that I don’t embarrass them in front of Charleston society.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Miriam whispered.

Cole’s face fell into complete seriousness for maybe the first time since Noelle met him. “Sometimes we’re too ashamed of our secrets to tell them to the people we most want to love us.”

Miriam wrapped her arms around herself, nodding a little. Noelle could tell she was starting to fall apart at the seams, and she didn’t know how to fix it.

From the end of the banquette, Hannah asked, “You have no money? How are you buying plane tickets at the drop of a hat?”

“My parents aren’t super great at checking specifics of the AmEx Black. They don’t have a strong idea of what’s normal business travel, so I push that to the absolute outer limit.” He continued, “I could take out a loan contingent on my getting my full trust fund in five years, or…put it on credit. I mean, eventually I am going to be outrageously rich, I just might not have a credit score left by then.”

“I’m not putting you in that position,” Miriam said stubbornly.

“Alternately,” Cole offered, “I could divert Richard’s bank accounts to ACT UP NY, and then he couldn’t buy the farm.”

“Why haven’t you already done that?” Noelle demanded. If Cole, Miriam, and Ziva had all known Richard was still a threat, why hadn’t they already dealt with him? Why was everyone just sitting around waiting for him to ruin their lives?

“Miriam told me not to. Something about it being ‘illegal.’” Cole did finger quotes. He looked unconvinced by this argument and, at the moment, Noelle was, too.