2026-06-09 16:01:52“Emma.” I called out her name and she gave me a small smile. I guess because I hadn't picked up her call, she came to find out why I didn't.
“I know, I know you already guessed the reason why I showed up here, shamelessly.” She said, most probably so I couldn't bring up the topic but I was. I just wasn't going to excuse the fact that she showed up at my office without warning. “Why are you here?” “You're still so mean.” She looked away and then back to me. “Well, I came to see you. Is that not obvious.” “Why?” “Well, I have something I'd like for us to discuss.” . “That's why we have cell phones.” I shot at her and then realized my mistake. “I guess you realized that you've been the one who has refused to pick his call even after I called you so many times.” “I've been busy Emma… fixing the mess your mother made.” I was upset but I was trying so hard to hide it because my voice was pitching higher than usual.” “That's exactly why I'm here. I think that we need to talk.” “I have nothing to talk about with you…” “I'm trying to help you.” Emma cut me off. “It's about Victoria, something that would be totally useful to you in your search for revenge.” “And who told you that I was here for revenge?” I asked her honestly, trying to find out what she thinks. “I didn't say that to you so why do you think so?” “Well, I can see the look in your eyes. It's obvious that you want to hurt my mother so bad.” She paused. “And me too. I wouldn't blame you.” She took two steps towards me. “That's why I'm so eager to get on your good books.” “Really?” “Yes.” She responded. I thought about what Henry said. It was not a bad idea but I wished I could do something else apart from Indulging Emma. She had really hurt me when we were together and when I left the Pierce house, I swore that I didn't want to have anything to do with them anymore, especially not with Emma. Thinking deeply about it, this might actually be a very big mistake. If Victoria finds out that I was speaking with Emma even after her previous warning, she might do worse things than the ones she did before. “I'll talk to you just for 5 minutes, Emma. Only five minutes, then you leave. Follow me to the car.” I wish she wouldn't follow me so closely but she did and I saw people stare at us like we were performing a kind of magic. I didn't like it but I guess I was stuck with her. “Don't walk too close to me.” I told her but she sighed. Whenever she did that, it just meant that she wasn't going to listen. I dated Emma for some years so I knew how to handle her, sometimes. “It doesn't matter what people think?” It sounded like a joke coming from her. The driver was already waiting for me at the car park. I had to ask him to wait outside the car while I and Emma discuss. “We're here so go on.” She cleared her throat like whatever she was going to say would make sense. I still decided to listen to her. “I know that you are very busy so I can't waste your time, I can help you get back to Victoria. She trusts me.” “Why?” I asked a simple question and it seemed to throw her off balance. “What do you mean by why? I'm only trying to help you. Don't you need help?” “No, not from someone like you.” She stopped talking and her eyes started to blink so many times. I knew that what I had said had hurt her. It was always like this. “Really? Is that how insignificant I am to you?” She asked me, probably thinking I'd feel guilty. “Well, you must have seen me as insignificant for you to throw me like trash even when I pleaded with you.” I was surprised I kept bringing up the past. In fact, I didn't think I still remembered my past but why was I being verbal about it. “You need to forgive me..” “No. I'll forgive you when I want to forgive you. You don't tell me when to forgive you. You don't have the right.” I shot at her. It was fast and sudden. “I'm sorry and I'm trying to make up by giving you all the information you need.” “Alright..what should I know?” She said nothing but only glared at me. She wasn't prepared yet but here she was asking for forgiveness. Sometimes, I wonder what really made me fall for Emma in the first place. “Well, I haven't yet gotten any information but I will.. “ “I'd like to leave now, if you don't mind.” “Can I go with you?” She asked me. “I mean Lily would be glad to see that I showed after promising her that I'll come again.” “You saw her a few days ago, Emma.” “I know but..” “Thay girl right there is the most important person in my life and I would be glad if you'd let her be. Don't get her involved in this pity party you are throwing here.” Emma was speechless for a while, maybe trying to counter what I said but she didn't. What else could she say? “Tell her I asked about her. Goodbye.” She responded before stepping out. She looked defeated, the look I lived for. I asked my driver to come inside and soon we were driving on the bust street. Inside the company, everything seemed easy and organized but outside here, it all seemed disorganised and difficult. The outside world reminded me of the days I had to struggle to eat even though I lived with rich people. The outside world reminded me that the world could be heartless and I should still have a bit of kindness even when the world didn't deserve it
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chapter 167
The formal charges arrived three weeks after Margaret's statement, delivered through official channels that moved, for once, with a speed that surprised even Patricia."Swiss federal prosecutors have filed charges," she told me, reading from a translated summary her office had received that morning, the two of us standing in the study while Henry listened from his usual chair near the window. "Breach of fiduciary duty regarding the trust's charitable designation. Falsification of the foundation's stated purpose across multiple regulatory filings. And, most significantly, a charge the prosecutors are calling institutional endangerment of minors, built specifically around the testimony the forty-three former students have now formally provided."I sat with that for a long moment, the particular weight of it settling into something I had not entirely expected to feel — not triumph exactly, though there was some of that threaded through it, but something closer to a genuine, sober gravity
chapter 166
I called Sandra that same afternoon, and told her everything — the meeting at the restaurant, the recording, Margaret's precise offer, and my decision. She was quiet for a long moment after I finished, and when she spoke, her voice carried a particular careful weight I had come to recognise, across two significant stories together, as the sound of a journalist genuinely moved by something beyond the story itself. "I want to be honest with you," she said. "I would have understood if you'd taken the deal. I would not have thought less of you for it. Protecting your family and your company from years of continued litigation is not a small thing to weigh against one woman's privacy, particularly a woman who has already, by every account, suffered a genuine reckoning." "I know," I said. "I almost did take it. Two days of almost taking it, honestly." "What changed," Sandra asked. "My seven-year-old cousi
chapter 165
Lily was at the kitchen table the next morning, methodically arranging her cereal into what I had come to understand was a private, evolving system of classification, when I sat down across from her instead of taking my usual seat. She looked up immediately, reading, as she always did, that something in the shape of the morning had changed. "You're doing the thinking face," she said. "The really serious one. Not the company one. The other one." "I have a question for you," I said. "A real one. I want you to think about it properly before you answer, the way you always do." She set down her spoon, giving me the particular full, undivided attention she reserved for exactly these moments, and I found myself, looking at her small, serious face, grateful, not for the first time, that I had never once made the mistake of treating her seriousness as something smaller than an adult's. "The woman who tried to visit your school," I said carefully. "Margaret. She's asked me for somethin
chapter 164
I did not sleep well that night, and I did not sleep well the two nights after it either.Patricia came to the mansion the following morning, and I laid the offer out for her exactly as Margaret had given it to me, watching her expression shift through several careful stages as she worked through the legal architecture of what was actually being proposed."This is a genuinely favourable settlement, from a purely legal standpoint," she said, once I had finished. "Full withdrawal of her claim. Cessation of the share accumulation. Formal severing from Hargrove, which would very likely finish whatever remains of his shareholder coalition, since he has no independent resources of his own to continue funding it. If you accepted this today, the corporate threat that has occupied a significant portion of this family's attention for months would simply end.""And the cost," I said."The cost is narrower than it sounds," Patricia said carefully. "She is not asking you to suppress the story of R
chapter 163
I thought about Margaret sitting across from me in that quiet hotel sitting room, speaking about her father's cruelty and her own thirty years of silence. I thought about how convincingly she had described a woman who had kept her distance from the family's worst patterns. And I understood, with a sudden, cold clarity, that the woman in those letters, patient, warm, relentlessly invested in shaping the lives of children she had never publicly acknowledged, was not the woman who had described herself to me.Or perhaps she was exactly the same woman, and I had simply been shown only the version she chose.---The regulatory pressure intensified through the following week, and I found myself following it the way one follows a storm on a weather map, tracking each new front as it moved across the continent.A Swiss newspaper obtained and published a partial list of the Vane trust's donations to Ravensbrook, revealing that the annual payments had increased sharply in the two years followin
chapter 162
The collapse did not begin in the city where I lived. It began, as Henry explained it to me over the phone at six in the morning, four thousand miles away, in a glass-fronted office building in Geneva, where a Swiss financial regulator had opened a formal inquiry into the Vane Family Trust barely thirty-six hours after Sandra's article ran."The regulator cited the article directly in its notice," Henry said, his voice carrying the particular clipped precision he adopted when he had been awake for a long time and had not yet allowed himself to feel anything about what he had learned. "Not as evidence, but as the reason the inquiry was opened. It requires the trust to produce records of every payment made to Ravensbrook Academy across its entire operating history, and to explain the purpose of each one."I sat up in bed, the grey pre-dawn light barely beginning to soften the edges of the curtains."Every payment," I said. "Forty years of them.""Forty years of them," Henry agreed. "Swi
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