Part 5
“I need you to leave.”
Victoria stood.
“I am sorry.”
“Please don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Say the correct thing immediately.”
Victoria’s face warmed.
Elena pulled the robe tighter around herself. “I can’t hear it tonight.”
Victoria moved to the connecting door.
“I will be next door.”
“Don’t call anyone without telling me.”
“I won’t.”
“Not a lawyer. Not the board. Not a doctor.”
Victoria held the key card between two fingers.
“Not my mother,” Elena added.
“I will not call anyone.”
Elena looked at her for a long moment, testing the promise.
Then she nodded.
Victoria entered the adjoining room and closed the connecting door. She placed a chair beneath its handle on her side, not to keep Elena out but to make the barrier visible. Then she sat at the desk and opened her phone.
There were seventeen messages.
Richard had sent a draft statement describing “a private family disagreement.” Adrian had sent only one line.
You have no idea what she has been doing.
Celeste had called twice.
The board’s lead independent director wanted an emergency meeting at seven the next morning. Victoria’s assistant had forwarded a message from a reporter asking whether Adrian had been injured at the Vale estate.
It had already begun.
Victoria switched off the phone.
At three in the morning, a soft knock sounded on the connecting door.
She removed the chair.
Elena stood on the other side holding her dead phone.
“The charger worked,” she said. “But it won’t accept my passcode.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve used the same number since college.”
Victoria caught herself before asking whether Adrian knew it.
The phone displayed a security lockout notice. Too many attempts had been made.
“When did you last use it?” Victoria asked.
“This afternoon, before Celeste took it.”
“Could she have tried to open it?”
“She knows the old code.”
“Would Adrian?”
Elena gave her a tired look.
Victoria set the phone on the desk. “Do you have backups?”
“I think so. The laptop is at the estate.”
“Cloud backup?”
“I don’t know. Adrian set up the account when we married.”
The words settled between them.
Elena sat on the edge of the second bed.
“I sound ridiculous.”
“No.”
“I don’t know the password to my own phone backup. I don’t know what bank holds the household account. I don’t know the alarm code to the house where I live.”
“You are not ridiculous.”
“I used to travel alone.”
Victoria waited.
“I went to Prague when I was twenty-two,” Elena continued. “I had seventy dollars left when the airline lost my bag. I washed the same shirt in a sink for four days and argued with a station manager in terrible Czech. I found my way home.”
A small laugh escaped her, sharp and humorless.
“Now I can’t leave a house because my husband turned off an app.”
Victoria sat across from her.
“What changed?”
“Nothing at once.”
Elena rubbed her thumb along the edge of the phone.
“That’s the problem. He never said I couldn’t work. He said we traveled too much for me to commit to students. He never said I couldn’t see friends. He said they treated him like an ATM. He never said I couldn’t have money. He said separate accounts made marriage feel transactional.”
She glanced at Victoria.
“Do you know what the stupid part is?”
Victoria shook her head.
“I agreed with him. Every time.”
“That does not make it your fault.”
“No, but it makes it harder to know where the lie started.”
Victoria looked down at her hands. The slap had left a dull ache across the base of her fingers.
“Do you want me to contact June?”
Elena’s expression tightened.
“The woman you paid?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“She may be willing to speak with you.”
“Or she may not want the Vale family finding her again.”
Victoria accepted the correction.
“You’re right.”
Elena stood and carried the phone back to the connecting doorway.
“I want to see a doctor in the morning,” she said. “Someone I choose.”
“All right.”
“And a lawyer.”
“All right.”
“Not Richard.”
“No.”
Elena rested one hand on the door.
“I don’t want you to fix this.”
Victoria met her eyes.
“I don’t know yet what I want you to do.”
“That is fair.”
Elena closed the door gently.
The doctor’s office opened at eight. Elena chose it from a list on the hotel notepad after reading reviews for nearly an hour. It was a small urgent-care clinic attached to a grocery store in the next town. Victoria stayed in the car while Elena went inside with Samuel.
The decision was Elena’s. It still felt like abandonment.
Victoria watched shoppers push carts through the automatic doors. A man in paint-stained work pants carried three cartons of milk. A woman argued with a little boy about a cereal box. The ordinary morning continued within sight of the most serious mistake of Victoria’s life.
Her phone vibrated.
This time, she answered the board director.
“Margaret.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Where is Elena?”
“With a doctor.”
Margaret Chen went silent.
“That answers one question,” she said.
“What question?”
“Whether this is merely a family disagreement.”
Victoria looked at the clinic entrance. “It was never merely that.”
“Adrian says you struck him after Elena became violent toward Celeste.”
“Did Celeste say Elena was violent?”
“She says Elena shoved her.”
“Elena has a mark on her wrist.”
“Adrian has a mark on his face.”
“I put it there.”
“Which makes you a witness and a participant.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? The succession vote is tomorrow. We cannot put Adrian in charge while this is unresolved. We also cannot remove him based on your account alone when you assaulted him during the incident.”
“Then postpone the vote.”
“The merger team will interpret that as instability.”
“They should.”
Margaret exhaled. “Richard sent the executive committee a summary at five this morning. It included references to Elena’s psychiatric care.”
May you like
“She spoke to one doctor Adrian selected.”
“That distinction was not in the summary.”
