Chapter 24
The Riverside parcel. The permit that skipped review. The variance that went through in six days.
Marcus Martinez was indicted on eleven counts.
He called her that night. She didn’t recognize the number, which was why she answered.
“Elena.”
His voice was different. She had known that voice in every register — charming, cold, indulgent, furious, tender in the specific way he used tenderness like a tool. She had never heard it sound like this. Small.
“You need to make this stop.”
“I can’t make anything stop, Marcus.”
“You can. You tell them you were confused. That you were having an episode. You take it back and this all goes away and we go home and —”
“No.”
“Elena —”
“I spent twelve years being told what I was.” She stood at the window with the phone against her ear and the city spread out below her like something she finally owned a piece of. “A placeholder. A pretty face. A thing that smiled for photos. You want me to be confused, so you can be the one who explains me to everyone.”
Silence.
“I’m not confused,” she said. “I’ve never been less confused in my life.”
“You’ll regret this.” But it came out thin. There was nothing behind it anymore.
“I won’t,” she said. “But I hope you do. I hope you have a long time to think about it.”
She hung up.
The settlement came six weeks after the indictment — not because Marcus agreed, but because Rebecca made it clear what a trial would look like. Twenty-two million. The Lake Forest house. The Chicago apartment. A restraining order with real teeth. And a clause Rebecca had insisted on adding herself, which Marcus’s lawyers fought for three days and then surrendered.
The ring.
Elena collected it from the evidence room on a Thursday. Her grandmother’s ring, resized for another woman’s finger, then resized back. It sat in a small plastic bag with a barcode on it, and the clerk made her sign three forms, and she carried it out into the street and held it up to the light.
Her grandmother had worn it for fifty-one years. She’d given it to Elena on her deathbed, with a hand so thin it looked like paper, and said, this was the only thing my husband ever gave me that he didn’t want something back for.
Elena had been nineteen. She’d thought it was a joke about old men.