Chapter 5: Harold
Harold was waiting when I returned, the tablet still within reach, the auction’s aftertaste still on his tongue.
He wanted the version where Owen’s interest was romantic or transactional or somehow my secret. I gave him the version that was true: a collapsed partnership, a buried trust, a search that had nothing to do with the Prescott Foundation’s wine list. I watched the information land and rearrange his face—calculation replacing jealousy, then something closer to fear when he understood the money and the name predated him.
“We’ll handle this together,” he said. “Attorneys. Quietly. The foundation’s reputation—”
“You put me on a stage and asked a room for five hundred dollars,” I said. “You do not get to manage my original name as a branding problem.”
May you like
He reached for the familiar tools: volume, injury, the claim that I was overreacting to a joke everyone had understood as theater. I let him finish. Then I told him the blue dress was going to the cleaner and that I would be speaking to counsel of my own. The marriage that had trained me to smile through the least-interesting toast did not automatically get a seat at the table where Anastasia Robbins’s history was being reopened.
That night he slept in the study. I slept in the bed and did not perform forgiveness for an audience of one.
