Chapter 11
Bennett.”
A cardboard box sat beside him.
One box.
Damian had chosen what belonged to me.
I opened it.
Three dresses.
My winter boots.
A framed photograph of my parents.
Two paperback novels.
A hairbrush.
My grandmother’s ceramic bird.
Nothing else.
Not my mother’s silver bracelet.
Not the letters my father wrote me in college.
Not my notebooks.
Not the small box of photographs from before I met Damian.
Mara’s expression hardened.
“Where are the rest of her personal belongings?”
Raymond looked miserable.
“I was told this is what I could release.”
“By whom?”
“Mr.
Wolfe’s office.”
A voice came from behind us.
“Clara.”
Celeste Wolfe crossed the lobby.
At sixty-three, she could make walking twenty feet look ceremonial.
Cream coat.
Black gloves.
Silver-blond hair.
Pearls at her throat large enough to pay my father’s mortgage for a year.
She stopped beside the box.
“So this is what you wanted.”
I closed the cardboard flaps.
“What?”
“To humiliate him.”
Mara stepped forward.
Celeste ignored her.
“You waited until the divorce was finalized.”
“I did.”
“Cowardly.”
“Careful.”
Something flashed behind her eyes.
For years, Celeste had spoken to me as if I were a child invited accidentally to an adult table.
Now she looked at me differently.
Not respectfully.
But accurately.
“You think investors are going to believe you over Damian?”
“They do not need to believe me.”
I lifted the box.
“They need to read.”
Celeste’s face hardened.
“You were nothing when he met you.”
There it was again.
The family prayer.
I shifted the box against my hip.
“I had a job.”
She blinked.
“I had parents who loved me, friends who knew me, a bank account with my own name on it, and an apartment where no one threatened to lock me outside.”
My voice stayed quiet.
“I was not nothing.”
Celeste looked almost offended.
I continued.
“I just became easier to convince after I married him.”
Mara pressed the elevator button.
Celeste stepped closer.
“If Harbor Crown collapses, thousands of people are affected.”
“I know.”
“Then stop this.”
“I cannot.”
“You started it.”
“No.”
The elevator doors opened.
“I asked a question.”
I stepped inside.
“Damian decided whether the answer was dangerous.”
The doors began closing.
Celeste’s composure finally cracked.
“What do you want?”
I looked at her through the narrowing gap.
“The truth.”
The doors closed.
That evening, Damian finally answered the investors.
Mara received the response through counsel less than an hour later.