Chương 8
“I pulled away.”
“Did he release you?”
“No.”
“Did he push you?”
Livia looked at the recording device on the table.
“He moved me backward.”
“How?”
“His hand was on my wrist. The other was near my shoulder.”
“Did he apply force?”
“Yes.”
“Did you lose your balance?”
“Yes.”
“Did you fall because of the force?”
A long pause.
“Yes.”
Her heel caught the edge of the pale rug. Her right temple struck the brass corner of the side table. She did not lose consciousness immediately. She remembered the chandelier breaking into several blurred lights. She remembered Sebastian standing above her with both hands open.
He said, “Why do you always make things ugly?”
She tried to rise.
He told her to stay down.
Then he walked to the library and attempted to open the desk drawer. When he returned, she had activated the emergency call on her watch. He saw the screen illuminate and slapped her wrist toward the rug. The call connected anyway.
“Was that when you said, ‘Dad, I need’?” Noland asked.
“Yes.”
“Why call him?”
Livia looked toward the closed door beyond which Mara waited.
“Because he always comes.”
The answer made her cry for the first time.
Not dramatically. Her face remained still while tears gathered and slipped down one at a time. She wiped them with a tissue, annoyed by each one.
After the interview, she found Mara at the vending machines trying to make a granola bar fall from a jammed coil.
Mara struck the side once with the heel of her hand.
“That seems beneath your training,” Livia said.
Mara looked over. “My training says not to escalate with machinery until negotiation fails.”
“Did it fail?”
“The machine has stopped responding.”
Livia pressed the selection button again. The coil turned and released two bars.
Mara picked them up. “You have diplomatic instincts.”
They sat on a bench near a window overlooking the courthouse parking garage. Livia ate half a granola bar despite having no appetite. Mara left the second unopened between them.
“Did my father send you?” Livia asked.
“No.”
“Did he ask where I was?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
“That you were giving a statement.”
“Did you tell him I asked him not to come?”
“I told him you chose who attended.”
Livia considered that. “How angry was he?”
“Quiet enough that the chief asked him to leave the office.”
“He went to work?”
“He went to deliver his written account. They reminded him he was on leave.”
A weak smile touched Livia’s mouth. “He has never understood doors with his name on them can still be closed.”
“He is learning several things this week.”
“Is he?”
Mara opened her granola bar. “Slowly. With resentment.”
“That sounds more accurate.”
They ate in silence.
A courthouse employee crossed the parking garage carrying a birthday cake in a clear plastic container. Wind lifted the employee’s jacket. She bent over the cake, protecting it with her body until she reached the next building.
Livia watched her go.
“Sebastian never hit me before,” she said.
Mara did not turn.
“He held me. Blocked doors. Took my keys once because he said I was too upset to drive. He read messages. He corrected stories while I was telling them.” Livia rubbed a crumb between her fingers. “It sounds small when listed.”
“It doesn’t.”
“I made it sound small.”
“That is different.”
“He could be kind for months.”
“I believe you.”
“That makes it worse.”
“I know.”
Livia looked at Mara. “Do you?”
Mara took time before answering. “I know people can be generous and still dangerous. I know one fact doesn’t cancel the other. I know outsiders prefer a clean category because then they don’t have to wonder what they’ve tolerated.”
Livia lowered her gaze.
Mara said, “I also know your father will try to turn this into a problem he can stand between you and.”
“He already has.”
“You can tell him to move.”
“He doesn’t move.”
“He does when the order comes from someone he respects.”
“And if he doesn’t respect me?”
Mara’s expression sharpened. “That is not the problem between you.”
The financial investigation widened over the following weeks.
The foundation’s credentials had been used to approve the guarantee from an internet address assigned to the Crowe family office. Login records showed access at 1:18 in the morning while Livia was attending a museum benefit in another state. A verification code had been sent to an old tablet registered in her name but stored in Sebastian’s office.
The electronic signature matched hers because it was hers—copied from a prior tax filing.
The loan money had not gone directly into Sebastian’s pocket. It had kept a failing riverfront development from default. Hundreds of employees and contractors depended on the project. Pension funds held part of the debt. Sebastian had convinced himself that protecting the company protected everyone attached to it.
In messages recovered from the family office, he told his chief financial officer that Livia would approve the guarantee “once the noise settles.”
She never had.
The chief financial officer hired his own lawyer.
The foundation board suspended Livia during the review, not because members believed she had participated, but because her credentials had been used and their insurer demanded independent control. The decision arrived by email at 7:42 on a Monday morning.
She read it three times while sitting at the small dining table in Elias’s house.
She had moved there after a photographer identified her hotel. Sebastian’s lawyers denied responsibility for the leak. Within hours, reporters had filled the lobby, and a man pretending to deliver flowers tried to reach her floor.
Elias offered his home again without conditions.
Livia accepted with six.
May you like
No colleagues guarding the house. No tracking her phone. No speaking to reporters. No contacting investigators on her behalf. No entering her bedroom without permission. No asking where she was going every time she picked up her coat.
He wrote the conditions on the back of an old grocery receipt and placed it beneath a magnet on the refrigerator.
