Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 34: Overheard PART 2

The drive to Elizabeth's residence took twenty-two minutes.

Diana used them to construct the conversation with the methodical efficiency she brought to confrontations she had decided were necessary — the points in order of importance, the responses to likely objections, the overall structure of what needed to be communicated and why.

By the time she came through Elizabeth's front door she was prepared.

Elizabeth was in the sitting room with her tea and her customary window-side chair, and she looked at Diana when she came through the door with the expression of a woman who had been expecting this visit and had estimated its arrival time reasonably accurately.

"Diana," she said. "Sit down."

"I'll stand," Diana said. "I won't be long." She kept her voice even and direct. "Marcus Hayes was here this morning."

"He was."

"He came without an invitation —"

"He came because I invited him," Elizabeth said.

Diana paused. "Liam said —"

"Liam," Elizabeth said, with the patient, precise diction of someone correcting a factual error, "says a great many things. I'd recommend calibrating how much weight you assign to them." She set her cup down. "I invited Marcus Hayes here this morning because I had a task for him. A professional one. Which he has gone to complete."

Diana looked at her grandmother.

"Grandma." She pulled in a breath and let the prepared structure go, because the structure had been built on a different version of this conversation. "I understand that he made an impression at your birthday. He has a talent for making impressions. But I need you to understand something about the man you've invited into your home." She kept her voice steady.

"He stole from me. From my company. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars, two days ago, wired directly to his account." She met Elizabeth's eyes. "That is documented. That is a bank record. He is not who he presents himself as and he is not someone you should be trusting with anything valuable."

Elizabeth looked at her for a long moment.

Not with the alarm Diana had expected, or the sharp concern of a woman receiving a warning about someone in her household. Something else moved across her face — something that was quieter and more complicated and looked, if Diana was reading it correctly, uncomfortably like disappointment.

"Diana," Elizabeth said.

"I know you think he's impressive —"

"I think," Elizabeth said carefully, "that you are a remarkably intelligent woman who is looking at something directly and not seeing it."

"I'm seeing it clearly," Diana said. "Clearly enough to tell you that —"

"Why did you marry him?"

The question arrived without preamble or softening.

Diana stopped.

"If he is what you say he is," Elizabeth continued, with the quiet persistence of a woman who had asked the right question and intended to receive an answer, "a thief, a criminal, someone not to be trusted — then why did you bring him into your house? Why does he still live under your roof? Why have you not had the contract dissolved?" She looked at Diana with those still, accurate eyes. "You are not a woman who makes mistakes and keeps them. You are a woman who identifies errors and corrects them. So either you made no error, or something is stopping you from correcting it." She folded her hands. "Which is it?"

The sitting room was very quiet.

Diana opened her mouth.

The answer she had prepared — the one that involved the social complexity of a public divorce and the optics of admitting a mistake and the precise, practical reasons she had been maintaining the arrangement — dissolved before it fully formed, because none of those reasons were the actual answer to the question Elizabeth had asked.

She didn't have the actual answer ready.

"He is not to be trusted," Diana said. "That's what I know. That's what you need to —"

"And yet you can't tell me why you married him." Elizabeth regarded her steadily.

"That's not —"

"And you can't tell me why you haven't ended it."

"I —"

The sitting room door opened.

Marcus came through it carrying the Flemish painting — handled correctly, both hands, the casual competence of someone who had done this before — and stopped in the doorway.

The room arranged itself around the three of them: Elizabeth at her window, Diana near the center, Marcus in the doorway with a four-hundred-year-old painting and an expression that was doing the specific, careful work of a man who has just walked into a room mid-conversation and has understood, in the space of three seconds, the complete content of everything that was said before he arrived.

His eyes moved to Diana.

He had heard. The door had been open. The sitting room carried sound into the corridor with the architectural generosity of old houses built before the era of acoustic privacy.

He had heard thief. He had heard criminal. He had heard her telling the one person in this family whose opinion he had come to genuinely value that he was not to be trusted.

He stood in the doorway and looked at Diana with an expression that was composed and steady and — for just a fraction of a second, before he managed it closed — something else.

Something that looked like it had a name and was choosing not to say it.

"The painting is authentic," he said to Elizabeth.

His voice was even.

"I know," Elizabeth said. She was watching both of them.

Marcus set the painting carefully against the wall beside the door, straightened, and looked at Diana one more time.

Then he looked at Elizabeth.

"Thank you for the tea," he said.

He left.

The front door closed quietly behind him.

The sitting room held the silence he left in it, and Elizabeth looked at her granddaughter with the expression of a woman who has watched something happen and is waiting for the other person in the room to understand what it was.

Diana looked at the doorway.

Her prepared conversation was gone.

She had nothing left to say.