Chương 6
“Can I go?”
“Yes.”
After he left, Jackson stood by the window.
The city below reflected faintly in the glass, laying another Jackson over him—transparent, slouched, and easier to look at.
“Did she know about the loan?” Margaret asked.
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“All of it.”
“Did she know the transfer was not joint property?”
“I don’t know what she understood.”
“You told Jonathan that you simplified it.”
Jackson’s reflection lowered its head.
“The loan wasn’t supposed to matter.”
“Eight million dollars generally matters.”
“It’s not eight anymore.”
“How much?”
“Ten point six.”
Jonathan’s expression tightened.
“Interest and fees?”
Jackson nodded.
Margaret looked at the wig in the bathroom doorway.
She wanted to put it on. Not because she was ashamed of her head, she told herself, but because she was tired of being visible.
She did not move.
“What obligations?” she asked again.
Jackson sat in the chair Ethan had used.
“Redwood.”
Margaret knew the name. Redwood House had been a boutique hotel project in Austin, one Jackson had championed four years earlier before the board rejected it. He had resigned from the Westbrook development committee after accusing the directors of treating him like an intern.
“You invested after the board said no?”
“With two partners.”
“Using what?”
“My own money.”
“You did not have eight million dollars.”
“I had two.”
“Then you borrowed six?”
“At first.”
Jonathan asked, “Was Northgate the original lender?”
“No. They refinanced when construction stalled.”
Margaret’s scalp felt cold beneath the air vent.
“Why did construction stall?”
“One partner diverted funds.”
“Did you report him?”
“He says I approved the expenses.”
“Did you?”
Jackson stared at the floor.
“I signed draws.”
“Without reviewing them?”
“I reviewed summaries.”
Margaret turned toward the window.
For one irrational second, she wondered whether she had caused this by teaching him to sign his name too easily. At sixteen, Jackson had practiced Charles’s broad, slanted signature on hotel stationery and joked that one day every building would belong to him. Margaret had laughed. She had been proud of his confidence because his father’s failures had made him frightened of looking uncertain.
She had mistaken imitation for ambition.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
Jackson’s answer was barely audible.
“Because you would have looked at me exactly like this.”
She turned.
“How am I looking at you?”
“Like I’m him.”
“I am looking at my son.”
“That’s worse.”
He stood again, suddenly restless.
“I had a plan. The transfer would give me enough liquidity to settle with Northgate, finish the hotel, and sell it. You would have gotten every dollar back.”
“It was not a loan.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. You keep saying I would have gotten it back.”
He walked toward the bathroom, stopped when he saw the wig, and turned away.
“Did Natalie know you intended to use the transfer for Redwood?” Jonathan asked.
“Yes.”
“Did she encourage it?”
Jackson laughed without humor.
“She wanted the debt gone. So did I.”
“Did she know the lender contacted us?”
“No.”
“Did she know the transfer might not occur?”
“No.”
Margaret watched his face.
“Why not?”
“Because until tonight, I didn’t think it wouldn’t.”
There it was.
Not cruelty. Not conspiracy. Something more familiar and perhaps more dangerous: entitlement so complete it experienced dependence as certainty.
Margaret folded her hands.
“You need to leave the hotel.”
Jackson looked at her.
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“Home.”
He looked toward the ballroom floors below them, where the remains of his reception were being cleared.
“I don’t know where that is.”
The sentence nearly reached her. He had always known how to say the thing that made anger feel like abandonment.
She held still.
“You have an apartment on Lake Shore Drive.”
“Natalie is there.”
“Then decide whether you are going with her.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Margaret felt an old answer rise automatically: Come with me. Let me fix it. Give me the papers. Sleep in the guest room. We’ll call Caroline in the morning. I’ll speak to the lender. I’ll protect you from your wife, your partners, yourself.
She looked at the note on the table.
“I want you to stop asking me that.”
He flinched.
Then he left.
Margaret slept for forty-three minutes.
At three twelve in the morning, she woke on the suite sofa with Evelyn’s jacket still around her shoulders and a missed call from her oncologist’s answering service. Jonathan had gone home after extracting a promise that she would not speak publicly until Caroline arrived. Evelyn had remained in the adjoining room.
The ballroom video had passed six million views.
Margaret watched it once without sound.
She saw herself at the microphone, saw the angle of her shoulders, the exposed curve of her scalp, the note held like a legal exhibit. She saw Natalie behind her, smiling for less than a second before the amount was announced. The expression disappeared, and the internet had already isolated that moment into a repeating clip.
People had added captions.
WHEN THE PRENUP HAS A PLOT TWIST.
GRANDMA CAME WITH RECEIPTS.
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY MILLION REASONS TO BE NICE.
Margaret closed the application.
A message from Jackson waited beneath three from board members and one from her younger sister in Arizona.
I’m at a hotel. Natalie says she didn’t write it. I don’t know what to believe.
Margaret read the words twice.
She did not reply.
At seven, she took the wig from its stand and put it on.
The familiar silver bob framed a face she barely recognized. She adjusted it, removed it, and left it on the bathroom counter.
Downstairs, the ballroom smelled of extinguished candles and damp flowers. Staff moved quietly among stripped tables. White petals covered the floor near the head table. Someone had placed the black microphone against a column.
Evelyn stood beside a cart, eating half a bagel from a napkin.
“You should be upstairs,” she said.
“So should you.”
“I work here.”
May you like
“So do I.”
Evelyn looked at Margaret’s uncovered head and then at the cart.
