Part 4
“I found it in Gideon’s desk two weeks ago,” Celia said. “I told him to destroy it.”
Gideon’s voice went low. “It was a draft.”
“You kept it.”
“I keep records.”
“You keep weapons.”
“Maren,” Julian said again.
She turned the second page.
There were handwritten notes in the margin.
Not Gideon’s handwriting. Julian’s.
Her stomach twisted.
One note sat beside the line about temporary authority.
She does not know I told him.
Another rested beside a paragraph discussing her interest in selling her shares.
She thinks selling is the only way to feel free.
And lower down, written smaller, as if whoever had written it did not want to see it afterward:
She’ll hate me if she finds out.
Maren’s vision blurred.
She looked up at Julian.
He was pale. Not guilty in the clean, simple way she wanted him to be. Guilty in a more unbearable way. He looked like a man who had done something for reasons he still believed in and had only just begun to understand how little that mattered.
“You wrote this.”
“I was trying to stop him.”
“You told him.”
“I told him because I thought he was going to go after you without telling you anything.”
“And that made you feel better?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
Julian’s mouth tightened. He looked toward the blue glass panels, then back at her.
“Because I didn’t know how to protect you from him without becoming part of it.”
The answer was almost worse than an excuse.
Gideon made a sound of disgust. “You did not protect her by encouraging her to run.”
Julian turned. “I didn’t encourage her to run.”
“You told her there was no safe way to stay.”
“I told her she didn’t have to choose between you and herself.”
The words struck Maren harder than they should have.
Celia watched them all with the tired, devastated expression of someone who had spent too long hoping three people could avoid a truth simply because no one wanted to say it cleanly.
Gideon looked at Maren.
“I never intended to use that document.”
“Then why write it?”
He held her gaze.
She waited for him to deny it. To say Celia misunderstood. To say Julian had manipulated the situation. To take the familiar route through power and certainty until the thing in front of them became something smaller.
Instead he said, “Because you were frightened.”
Maren blinked.
“That’s your answer?”
“You were making decisions in panic.”
“So you decided I shouldn’t get to make them.”
“I decided I wanted time.”
“To do what?”
“To keep you from ruining your life because you were angry at me.”
“I am angry at you.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
His face shifted, barely. The same expression he wore whenever she said something he could not dismiss but did not yet know how to answer.
Celia moved toward the table and folded the folder closed.
The sound of leather against leather seemed enormous.
“Enough,” she said.
Gideon looked at her. “Do not tell me enough in my own house.”
Celia’s eyes flashed.
“That sentence is exactly why we are here.”
Maren had looked at the gold handles on the double doors.
They were close enough to reach.
She had not left immediately. That was the part she kept returning to now, lying beneath Gideon’s hand on the black floor. She had stayed. She had stood there with the paper in front of her and listened to all three of them try to shape her life into something explainable.
Julian had taken one step toward her.
“Please let me tell you what happened.”
“You had months.”
“I thought I could fix it.”
“You thought you could manage me.”
“No.”
“That’s what all of you keep calling it when you mean control.”
Gideon’s jaw clenched.
Celia whispered, “Maren.”
But Maren had already stepped back from the table.
The pale rug caught the heel she had kicked off earlier and left near the entrance. One shoe lay on its side, the strap twisted. The other had disappeared beneath the lounge chair.
She looked down at them.
Such small things. So stupidly ordinary.
For a second, she wanted to put them on. She wanted to bend, fasten the straps, stand up straight, walk through the doors at a normal pace, and prove that nothing in the house could make her run.
Then Julian said, “There’s another page.”
Her head snapped up.
“What?”
His face changed immediately.
Celia closed her eyes.
Gideon turned toward him slowly. “Julian.”
Julian looked at the folder.
The silence became different.
Maren could feel it happening, the way one truth had made room for another.
“What page?” she asked.
Julian said nothing.
“Julian.”
He rubbed one hand over his mouth.
May you like
“There was a second draft,” he said.
Gideon’s voice hardened. “There was no second draft.”
