Chapter 1 - The Camera Was Watching
Nathan hit me before I finished saying his name.
His first slap turned my face toward a row of emerald necklaces. The second drove me backward against a glass display counter. My knees gave way, and I landed on the marble floor of his luxury jewelry store on Madison Avenue.
This was Nathan's empire. He reminded people of that whenever he had the chance.
Celeste Rowan stood beside a diamond display, dressed in champagne-colored silk. Her arms were crossed. Her expression was almost amused. She made no attempt to help me.
“What are you doing here?” Nathan demanded. “Are you following me?”
I looked up at him.
“You can't come into my store and cause a scene,” he added.
Behind him, one employee stopped arranging a jewelry tray near the entrance. Another turned her eyes away. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
Blood filled my mouth where I'd bitten the inside of my cheek. My silver diamond wedding ring had twisted on my finger. I remembered Nathan placing it there four years earlier. His hands had trembled that day. He had promised we would build a future together.
I got up without asking for help.
“I came to return something.”
I removed the ring. Then I placed it on the glass counter between us.
Celeste smiled wider. She thought she had won.
Nathan looked at the ring, then back at me.
“My lawyer will be claiming half your shares by tomorrow,” I said.
He stopped moving. For the first time since I'd entered the showroom, Nathan looked uncertain.
“Emma. Wait.”
I walked toward the door. His shoes scraped against the floor behind me.
“Emma, you can't do this.”
I didn't turn around.
I knew exactly where the security cameras were positioned in that showroom. That was why I'd chosen to confront him there. I wanted to know how Nathan would behave if he believed I had no leverage. I thought he might threaten me. I thought he might lie. I hadn't expected him to leave evidence of an assault in his own store.
Outside, I got into a cab and closed the door. Only then did I let myself look at my hands. They were trembling.
I photographed the swelling along my cheek, checked that the images were saved, and called Maya Ortiz.
Maya was the attorney who had examined a document I'd found in my mother's old files one week earlier. That document was supposed to give Nathan voting control of my forty-two percent interest in Vale Atelier when I turned twenty-nine. It had all the appearances of an authorized agreement. My signature. A notary stamp. A specific signing date.
But on that date, I'd been in Portland visiting my aunt. I hadn't even been in the same state. And I had never signed the document.
Friday was my twenty-ninth birthday. Nathan had scheduled an emergency shareholder meeting for that same day. Its purpose was to approve the sale of Vale Atelier—the workshop my mother had spent thirty years protecting.
If the forged authorization was accepted, Nathan could claim voting power over shares that belonged to me.
Maya answered on the second ring.
“Did you go to the jewelry store?”
“Yes.”
There was a pause. “What happened?”
“Nathan assaulted me. I need to report it. And we need to preserve the store's security footage.”
Maya was quiet. The cab's turn signal clicked steadily beside me.
“I'm coming to you,” she said. “Don't contact Nathan again.”
That evening, I went to urgent care. A doctor examined my injuries. Afterward, I gave my statement to the police. By the time I finally looked at my phone again, there was a new message waiting.
It was from Ruth Miller. Ruth had been my mother's bookkeeper before retiring.
She'd sent me a photograph taken three months earlier outside a small repair shop in Vermont.
A gray-haired man stood near the building, holding a jeweler's loupe to one eye. He wore a faded green field jacket. I recognized it immediately. It had belonged to my father.
Then I noticed his left hand. A pale scar crossed his thumb. I remembered that scar, too.
I brought the phone closer. The man in the photograph looked older than the father I remembered. But I knew his face.
Martin Vale. My father. The man who had supposedly died seventeen years earlier.
Beneath the photograph was a message from Ruth.
Emma, I think you deserve the truth.
I read those words three times. Then I called Ruth. She answered sounding breathless, as though she'd been waiting beside the phone.
“Is that him?” I asked.
“I believe so.”
“Believe? Ruth, you sent me a photograph of a dead man.”
“I sent you a photograph of a man who looks exactly like Martin. I spoke with the person who took it. His name at the shop is Martin Ellis.”
“Ellis was his middle name.” My voice sounded small to me. “Did my mother know?”
Ruth made a noise that wasn't quite a word.
“Please,” I said. “I can't take another half-truth tonight.”
“Your mother knew more than she ever told you. I don't know how much. I should have come to you earlier.”
When I ended the call, I sat on the edge of the urgent-care parking lot bench, looking down at my knuckles. The swelling in my face was becoming a steady ache. Somewhere in Manhattan, Nathan was probably preparing an explanation for why he'd hit his wife. Somewhere in Vermont, a man I had buried as a child was holding a jeweler's loupe to his eye.
Maya found me there with a paper cup of tea. She sat without speaking until I handed her the phone.
She enlarged the photograph, studied it, and gave the phone back.
“I'm not going to tell you what to think about this,” she said. “But tonight we have two separate problems. One is immediate. Tomorrow we have to notify the company that you dispute the proxy and demand that the original be preserved. The other problem is your father. You decide when you're ready for that one.”
I watched a bus pull away from the curb, its windows bright against the dark.
“Tomorrow?” I said. “Friday is four days away.”
“Four days is time to act. It's not time to panic.”
At home, I put my wedding-ring finger under cold water even though there was no injury there. The pale indentation remained. I found my mother's old canvas work apron in the bottom of the closet, folded exactly where I'd left it after her funeral five years before.
Inside its pocket was a short strip of blue painter's tape. My mother used the tape to mark unfinished pieces so no one would mistake a trial design for a finished one. On the strip she'd written one word: WAIT.
I set it on the kitchen table beside the photograph from Vermont.
May you like
The last time I had been told to wait for my father, I was twelve years old. I had waited seventeen years.
I wasn't doing it again.
