Chapter 2
I would not cry.
Not here. Not in front of him. Not where he could add it to the inventory of things he had taken.
I placed one hand on my belly and began to stand.
Then the courtroom doors opened.
They did not open quietly. They opened the way things open when someone has decided that quiet is not the appropriate register for what is about to happen — both panels, simultaneously, driven by a force that was deliberate rather than dramatic, making the kind of sound that crosses a room in less than a second and lands in the chest before the ears have finished processing it.
Four security personnel entered first, moving to the corners of the room with the practiced efficiency of people who have been given specific positions and told to hold them. The judge's clerk half-stood. Ethan turned. The spectators in the gallery, the handful of associates and one junior attorney Ethan had brought as audience, went still.
Then she walked in.
I saw the coat first — ivory, precisely tailored, the kind of garment that has been made for a specific body rather than fit to one. Then I saw the way she moved, which was the walk of someone who had long since stopped adjusting her pace to the expectations of any room she was entering. She was somewhere in her late fifties, with silver-streaked hair pulled back in a way that was elegant without performing elegance, and she was carrying a sealed folder against her chest the way you carry something you have spent a very long time waiting to deliver.
May you like
Victoria Kensington. I knew the name the way everyone in this country knew it — from financial pages, from board announcements, from the occasional profile in a publication that treated billionaires as weather systems to be tracked and described. I did not know why she was in this courtroom.
Then she looked at me.
