fed him, especially when they were tired.
‘A charity case,’ I repeated.
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘You signed your father’s name into a lie.’
He exhaled hard. ‘It was paperwork. Symbolic paperwork. No one was supposed to actually—’
‘Actually what? Check? Ask? Expect the money you invented?’
Vivienne stood very still by the desk.
Adrian’s voice broke into impatience. ‘You don’t understand the pressure I’m under. Do you know what it’s like walking into those rooms with nothing? Do you know how they look at me?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I sat beside their service door all night.’
He went quiet.
I let the silence stretch because he deserved to stand inside it.
Then Celeste’s voice sliced through in the background.
‘Tell her to unlock it. Tell her this is not the moment for one of her martyr performances.’
Vivienne’s eyes sharpened.
Another voice followed, deeper and furious. Lionel Vale.
‘Unlock what? What account? Adrian, whose money paid the venue?’
The phone filled with chaos.
Adrian said my name once, like a warning and a plea.
I ended the call.
For the first time since the place card, I felt steady.
Not happy. Not vindicated. Steady.
Vivienne gathered the papers. ‘They are in the private breakfast room.’
‘All of them?’
‘Enough.’
I looked down at myself. The dress from last night was creased. My hair was pinned badly. My feet ached. I could have changed. I could have made them wait while I dressed myself into someone more formidable.
But they had not hidden a formidable woman. They had hidden me.
I put on my pearls.
Vivienne opened the door.
At the end of the hallway, the elevator opened and Adrian stepped out.
He had removed his bow tie but was still in his wedding tuxedo. His face looked pale and damp. Beside him stood Celeste, wearing a long coat over her wedding dress. Mascara shadowed her lower lashes, but her chin remained high.
In her right hand, she held a gold watch.
My husband’s watch.
The hallway narrowed around it.
I had not seen that watch in years. After Thomas died, I placed it in a cedar keepsake box with his wedding band, a photograph of him holding Adrian as a baby, and the recipe card for his cinnamon rolls. That box had been in my bedroom closet until six months ago, when Adrian had helped me move several things into storage.
Celeste saw me looking and closed her fingers around it.
‘Your husband promised it to my family first,’ she said.
Even Vivienne went pale.
Adrian whispered, ‘Celeste, don’t.’
But she was past listening. Panic had stripped the polish from her. Beneath it was not grief or fear. It was entitlement cornered and biting.
‘Adrian said his father wanted the Marlowe name attached to something significant,’ she said. ‘He said the watch was proof of family continuity. He gave it to me for the foundation archive.’
I looked at my son.
He could not meet my eyes.
The boy who had once slept beside bakery ovens had stolen his father’s watch to decorate a lie.
I walked toward them slowly.
‘Give it to me.’
Celeste’s hand tightened. ‘This belongs to Adrian too.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It belonged to Thomas. Then it belonged to me. Adrian had memories.
