Page 43 of Kiss and Tell
“Probably for the best, even though most people would understand.”
“True. If it was a jury of women, I’d walk free if I told them—” I break off and take another bite. I want to change the subject. “To answer your earlier question about keeping up with you, I check your Instagram sometimes. Enough to get a sense of what you’ve been up to. But I have questions. Probably nosy ones.”
He sucks air through his teeth. “Unfortunately, you’re way over the five-question limit.”
“True,” I say, standing and reaching for his half-full plate. “It was nice pranking you. Have a good walk home.”
“But I’ll answer them.” He tugs the plate back.
I sit and smirk. “Next question: how come you acted like you couldn’t even afford the camp store snacks when you were always a baby tycoon?”
This was the thing I hated discovering the most when I could bring myself to snoop on him months after camp. Because this was the one thing he’d out-and-out lied about. I’d found his sister’s Instagram through her comments on one of his posts, and while Sawyer kept his posts low-key and impersonal, hers were a goldmine. Almost literally.
Pictures of their family in their huge house. Pictures of them on a sailboat. Pictures of them in front of European landmarks.
Every picture of Sawyer had hurt for a long, long time. But his sister’s had hurt worse because they told the story of a boy very different from the one I’d known. The question had slowly taken root. Was this why he’d never considered us being together after camp?
He shifts. “I was never poor. Just broke.”
“Same thing.”
“Not at all. Poor is a thing you can’t get out of. Broke is a cash flow issue that resolves eventually.” He shifts in his seat again.
“Sawyer.” I point my fork at him. “You are literally being shifty right now.”
He stills. “I’m not trying to be cute or do a marketing job on my past. Yes, I come from money. A lot of it. I went to private school all the way through college.”
“Wait. You went to UMass.” He’d worn a University of Massachusetts T-shirt around camp sometimes.
A hint of color heats his cheeks. “It was less obnoxious than the truth.”
“Which is?”
“MIT?” he says. I gape at him. “Double major in engineering and business.”
“MIT. A genius tycoon.” It isn’t sinking in. “Why were you out here every summer eating ramen on the weekends and saving your paychecks like you were never going to see another one?”
“Pride. I wanted to earn my own way. I wasn’t dumb enough to turn down paid college, but I earned all my living expenses in the summer. I picked camp counseling because room and board is free, and there’s nowhere to spend your money here, so it was easy to save. Then I lucked out and loved the job.”
“So you were, what, Richie Rich the whole time?”
He shoots me an annoyed look. “That’s exactly why I never told anyone.”
“I’ve never seen MIT on your Instagram.”
“It’s on my LinkedIn,” he says. “I don’t hide it now.”
He’s got me there. I’ve never been on LinkedIn, and his Facebook is locked down, so all my snooping has been on IG. “Is development the family business?” It would explain how he’s been able to grow his business so fast. “Is Camp Oak Crest now a Reed Family holding?”
“No. I inherited a trust fund from my grandmother when I turned twenty-six and used it as startup capital.”
“Kind of a random age.”
“She read an article about how human brains fully mature at twenty-five. She figured if she made our trust funds available at twenty-six, we wouldn’t make any idiotic impulse purchases when we got the money.”
“Did it work?”
“For me, yeah. I have two sisters and six cousins, and they’ve all done okay with it. We’re not talking millions here, but I’d been flipping houses for three years by then, and combined, it was enough seed money to move into commercial property and make something happen.”
