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Chapter 47
The conference room was on the third floor of a building that housed family court mediation services, which meant the walls were painted the particular shade of institutional beige that communicated neutrality and produced the opposite effect. Kai sat at the table with their lawyer, Patricia Chen, and looked at the beige walls and thought about how Richard had managed to make this happen in a week.The answer was that Richard had probably been preparing it for longer than a week and had filed when the moment suited him. The gala coverage had forced his hand. A positive morning in the papers was a shrinking window and Richard understood windows.The opposing lawyer was a man named Forsythe who had the specific manner of someone who had been paid to be unpleasant and had made peace with that. He arranged his documents on the table with the deliberateness of someone who wanted you to see how many there were.The judge overseeing the preliminary hearing was a woman named Caldwell, mid-six
Chapter 46
The morning papers arrived at seven and Vincent sent the digital links twenty minutes before that. Kai read them at the desk in Marcus's study, which had been cleaned and lit properly now that the generators were running permanently, and which he had been spending more time in than the master bedroom.The coverage was better than he had expected and he understood why immediately. The venue story had leaked before the gala, which meant the journalists who attended had arrived expecting a visible failure and found something else instead. Failure redeemed made a better story than success maintained. He understood this. He had given them the narrative they needed and they had used it.The Thorne Heir's Dramatic Return, one headline read. Another called the ruins venue audacious. A third ran a photograph of the entrance arch with the string lights visible through it and a caption about legacy reclaimed. Gerald Vance was quoted in one piece saying he found the evening impressive. Mrs. Black
Chapter 45
The first cars arrived at seven-thirty.Kai watched them from the entrance arch, the headlights moving up the drive through the cleared grounds, and thought about the last time vehicles had come up this road. Ten years ago they would have been fire trucks. He let the thought arrive and pass and straightened his jacket.The transformation held. That was the thing he hadn't been certain of until this moment, standing in it with other people present. In the daylight it had looked like ambition applied to wreckage. In the evening, with the string lights running through the open roof frames and along the standing walls and across the garden where the crews had cleared a decade of growth, it looked like something else. The blackened stone caught the light differently than new stone would have. The empty window frames became architecture. The collapsed east wing, carefully bordered and left as it was, looked intentional, a monument rather than a ruin.He heard a woman near the entrance say i
Chapter 44
The decision came at eleven-thirty at night, which was probably relevant to how it got made.Kai was sitting in Eleanor's study with a list of venues Vincent had compiled, each one annotated with capacity, availability, and the specific way it fell short of the Aldridge. A hotel ballroom that could manage the numbers but carried the aesthetic of a corporate conference. A private club that was technically available but whose membership list overlapped significantly with the people most likely to interpret the change as retreat. A rooftop space that was too small and too casual and would reframe the entire event in a way that served Richard's narrative rather than dismantling it.He set the list down and thought about the property Eleanor had returned to him.Lila was at the other end of the desk when he said it. She looked up from the catering contract she had been trying to salvage."The Thorne estate," he said.She looked at him for a moment. "Kai.""It's my property. It's large enou
Chapter 43
The rehearsal dinner was Lila's idea, framed as a practical necessity. Twelve guests, people who would be at the gala and who carried enough social weight that getting them wrong on the night would have consequences. A dry run, she called it. An opportunity to practice before the actual event.Kai understood the logic. He did not enjoy the three days leading up to it.Lila had constructed a system. Index cards, which she presented without irony, each one carrying a name, a face pulled from a social directory, a brief history of the relevant relationships, and the specific things that should not be said. She went through them with him at the desk in Eleanor's study each evening, running the stack like flashcards, asking questions, correcting errors, starting again.He was not good at it.The problem wasn't retention. He could retain information. The problem was that the information felt constructed, a scaffolding of social facts assembled to simulate familiarity that didn't exist, and
Chapter 42
The shift happened over seventy-two hours.Kai noticed it first in the quality of the silence. The phones that had been quiet, the inboxes that had accumulated polite non-responses and careful deferrals, began producing different sounds. A message from Gerald Vance's office requesting a brief call at Kai's convenience. An inquiry from a real estate investment group that had declined a meeting three weeks prior. A handwritten note from Mrs. Coulter, whose husband had been the first to stand at the shareholder meeting and ask about Kai's educational background, expressing how much she hoped they might have the chance to connect properly soon.He read the note twice and set it on the desk in Eleanor's study.Lila came in while he was still looking at it. She read it over his shoulder and made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh."Forty-eight hours," she said. "That's how long it took.""Thirty-six," he said. "The Vance message came yesterday morning."She picked up the note and held it. "S
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