Page 69 of Hard Count
Piper had forgotten about his birthday. Piper hated his birthday.
He didn’t reply.
Chapter Twenty-Five: New York City
Caleb Ward’s office was on the second floor of a building off Lafayette, a window that opened three inches onto a brick wall across an alley.
He had been there since nine that morning. It was past midnight now.
Nineteen months on a deep dive into the tech billionaire Jayson Days was consuming him. Most of his investigation had turned up nothing.
Caleb had built out a rather large file on Jayson. Most of it was dead ends, but three weeks ago, things started moving.
The first thread came from a former executive assistant.
He was able to meet her at a coffee shop using burner phones, and there were no names exchanged on the record.
“I’m not going to tell you anything that puts me in a room with him ever again,” she had said as her hands shook. “I am going to tell you where the money goes. You can find your way into those fucking rooms yourself.”
She had given a few useful nuggets.
One, the primary trust was registered in South Dakota under a name that appeared nowhere in any Days Holdings filing Caleb had ever come across. Two, the money in the trust came from six shell LLCs, all formed within a four-week window in 2019, all with the same agent, all dormant on paper. Three, the trust paid out quarterly, always on the same week, always to the same small set of beneficiaries.
She hadn’t given him the beneficiaries. She had told him he could find them himself if he were careful.
Thousands of pages, and days of research and he found something. Selby Ridge Holdings Trust, registered in SiouxFalls, a name with no apparent tie to anything Jayson-adjacent. He had cross-referenced its quarterly disbursements against the formation dates of the six shell LLCs and the dates had lined up too cleanly.
He had pulled the beneficiary list through a secondary filing in Delaware that should have been sealed but hadn’t been, because someone in 2021 had filed it with the wrong schedule. It was probably a paralegal error.
He was looking at the beneficiary list now.
There were four names.
Three of them he recognized, though not well. A European soccer star whose career had crashed out early, a young film director who was given a franchise to adapt but failed in epic fashion, and a young classical musician, who was at the top of his game before a nervous breakdown. They were all in their twenties at their career declines.
The fourth name, on the third row, was Piper T. Ashton. Piper was now thirty, and his success had outlasted all of the others on the bankroll.
The column beside the name showed the total disbursement, since the trust had opened, $90,000,000.
Quarterly payments since Piper’s rookie year. Routed through a common law firm in Palo Alto that had handled Jayson Days’ personal estate for years.
None of it was on Piper’s public endorsement sheet. None of it appeared in the standard disclosures that a pro-football player was required to disclose. None of it was in any IRS filing a journalist could reach without a subpoena, because the trust was structured to pay Piper in kind, property use, jet hours, medical, a service Caleb didn’t yet fully understand that appeared as “wellness retainer” on two separate lines.
It was, functionally, an allowance that was paid to a thirty-year-old starting quarterback by the man who had signed thepapers when he was twenty-one, alongside his parents as his managers at the time.
Caleb leaned back in his chair, there was something else.
The European soccer star had come out of a youth academy Jayson had “mentored.” The film director had met Jayson at twenty-one, during one of Jayson’s parties. The young classical musician had been photographed beside Jayson, at sixteen, at a benefit in Prague, and had then not been photographed with him again until the musician’s twentieth birthday, which had been held at Jayson’s property in Atherton, CA.
The patterns were all there on paper.
Exceptional young men, found early, underwritten financially, moved through a series of private settings in which Jayson was always present. Money kept them attached. Sub-contractual understanding that none of them were free to say no to the next invitation, because the next invitation was attached to the check that paid for the house, their families’ well-being, and the life they had all dreamed about.
And Piper Ashton was the fourth name. Piper was also the only one that was currently in the public eye.
Caleb had known Piper’s public story for years, like everyone had. Father killed in a highway accident on Pacific Coast Highway. A fame-hungry mother who had disappeared from the public eye, and the trades said she went dark post-rehab which was unlike her.
The official version was that Jayson had been there for a young man with nobody functional present.
