Chapter 2
I raised my phone.
Click. Ethan kissing Tessa.
Click. Margaret's hand touching Tessa's stomach.
Click. Richard with the champagne. The whole family arranged around a milestone I had not been invited to.
Then I heard Ethan's voice, quieter than his normal register, the voice he used when he was saying something he did not want to carry across a room.
"Once Amelia signs the year-end papers," he said, "everything is ours before the baby comes."
Richard glanced around. "Keep your voice down."
Ethan laughed. The specific laugh of a man who is not worried because he has assessed the risk and found it acceptable. "She trusts me. She signs whatever I put in front of her."
I stood behind the column and let that sentence settle into my body the way cold settles, completely and without drama.
She signs whatever I put in front of her.
The year-end papers. I knew what they were. I had been looking at them for two weeks on the corner of his desk in the study, a restructuring document related to Hartwell Designs, the company my father had built and left to me and which I had spent three years after his death learning to run in the way he would have wanted it run. Ethan had told me they were routine filings, annual housekeeping, the kind of thing that did not require my detailed attention. He had told me his attorney had reviewed them. He had left the signature pages on top.
I had not signed them yet. I had been meaning to. I had simply not gotten to it.
They boarded when the announcement came. Margaret adjusted Tessa's scarf one final time. Richard finished his champagne. Madison put her phone away. They moved toward the jet bridge in the easy, unhurried way of people who believe the world is arranged in their favor, and not one of them looked back toward the terminal.
Except Madison.
May you like
She turned at the entrance to the jet bridge, the reflexive backward glance of someone checking the space behind them, and she looked directly at the column I was standing beside, and I stepped out from behind it just far enough, and she saw my face.
She went pale in the way of a person who has been carrying a secret for a long time and has just seen the exact person that secret was kept from.
