Chapter 4
"You did," my father said. "My daughter was prepared to support that. You made a different choice tonight, in front of a witness, in a hotel suite whose security cameras logged entry times. I would suggest you speak to your attorney in the morning." A brief pause. "Goodnight, Adrian."
I took the phone off speaker.
I stood in the bridal suite with the white roses and the unopened champagne and the silk robe folded for a bride and I looked at my husband, who was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before, which was the expression of a man completing the inventory of what he had just lost and finding the total larger than anticipated.
Sienna gathered Adrian's jacket from the bed and left the suite without being asked. She did it quickly and without looking at either of us, which was the most honest thing she had done all evening.
Adrian and I stood in the silence after the door closed.
He said my name. Just my name, the way people say names when they have run out of everything else.
I picked up the champagne from the silver bucket. I looked at the label. It was very good champagne, the kind Adrian ordered because it photographed well and because the cost of it was a data point about the kind of man he considered himself to be. I set it back in the bucket without opening it.
"I'm going to stay here tonight," I said. "You'll make other arrangements."
He did not argue. That, more than anything else about the evening, told me the most accurate thing about Adrian Blackwell I had learned since the beginning: he was a man who understood leverage and responded to it, and the conversation with my father had established, clearly and finally, where the leverage was.
He left.
I sat in the chair by the window and looked at the city below, the lights of a skyline that did not know or care about the specific reordering that had happened in a penthouse suite while the wedding flowers were still fresh. My feet still hurt. There were still pearl pins in my hair. The clutch my mother had carried at her own wedding was on the table beside me.
May you like
I opened the champagne.
The proceedings my father had described began the following Tuesday, handled by a partner at Sullivan and Cromwell who had the pleasant, businesslike manner of someone who finds complicated financial clauses straightforward because they wrote them. The terms were what my father had outlined. Adrian's counsel attempted to contest two provisions and did not succeed, because the clause had been written by someone who understood that if you are going to bury a thing, you bury it so it cannot be unburied by someone who is motivated and in a hurry.
