“So if you personally are a trustee, did you know my brother?”

Another shadow of melancholy flashed over her green eyes. “Yes. But I knew his wife better. Adele was my cousin.”

“Oh. Wow,” Chance said. “I’m so sorry. Please accept my condolences for your loss, too.”

“Thank you.”

He wanted to ask if the two of them had been close, but he could tell just by looking at her that they had been. So he instead looked down at the trust statement. It pretty much went without saying that he’d never seen one before and had no idea what he was looking at, other than a lot of columns with words and numbers. Words like assets and liabilities and fund equity and numbers that had way more digits to the left of the decimal point than made sense.

“I don’t understand what I’m looking at,” he said.

She pulled herself out of her thoughts and went back to being the no-nonsense attorney from her emails. Well, except for the sticking-up hair and the smudged lipstick. And the fact that she felt less like a stranger than she had before.

“It’s what’s currently in the children’s trust. The rest of your brother’s estate will be in probate for now.” She passed another piece of paper across the table. “This is a list of your brother’s current assets outside the trust. Essentially, all of this will be added to the other funds at some point.”

Chance looked at those figures, too. Like the others, they were way too big to belong to a guy who’d left Endicott with nothing but a couple hundred bucks and a used Kawasaki.

He looked up at Poppy. “But this makes it look like Logan had hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.”

She held his gaze steadily with those bottle green eyes, and something in the pit of Chance’s stomach caught fire. “That’s because, when he died, your brother had hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.”

Chance’s eyebrows shot up to nearly his hairline. “How did Logan come by hundreds of millions of dollars?”

“Logan was working for a tech firm in Boston when—”

“Wait—what?” he interrupted again. “Logan worked for a tech firm?”

Although his brother had taught himself to code when he was still in middle school, and he’d been a good hacker of the dirty tricks variety when they were teenagers, Chance couldn’t see him ever living the cubicle lifestyle for a steady paycheck.

“Yes,” Poppy said. “And he developed a computer program several years ago that allowed companies to legally plunder and sell all kinds of personal information and online habits of anyone who used their websites. It goes without saying that it was worth a gold mine to corporate America. And corporate America paid your brother a gold mine for it.”