His Mistress Wore White to Our Daughter's Funeral · Ava Sterling

Chapter 2: The Third of March

The gate code didn't work.

I stood in front of the house I had lived in for nine years, in a wet funeral coat, punching in four digits that had been Lily's birthday since the week we brought her home.

Nothing. Not even the red light.

Through the hedge I could see the windows of the dining room lit up gold, and people moving behind them, and a caterer's van in the turning circle with its back doors open.

They were having a dinner. Four hours after we buried her, they were having a dinner.

The pedestrian gate opened when a girl in a black apron came out for a tray, and I walked in past her before it swung shut.

Nobody stopped me in the hall. The housekeeper, Ilse, saw me from the stairs and went very still and then very carefully looked somewhere else. That told me more than anything else that night. Ilse had bandaged my knee when I was a bride of twenty-one. Now she couldn't look at me.

There were eleven people at my table.

Camille was in my chair. Not a chair. My chair, at the end, the one with the arms, and the seat cushion I'd had recovered because Lily used to kneel on it to reach her drawing paper.

There were pale blue napkins folded into swans. A cake on the sideboard under a glass dome, iced in blue.

"It's a boy," Vivian was saying to the woman on her left. "Nine weeks Wednesday. Julian's grandfather's name, of course. We've waited a long while for it."

The room noticed me in a wave, the way water goes quiet.

Julian set down his glass. "Nora. This is not the evening."

"You cancelled the surgery."

Silence, complete.

I put the nurse's paper down on the tablecloth, in the middle of the bread and the candles, and slid it toward him with two fingers.

"Three point two million dollars reached the Klinik Rothenberg on the second of March," I said. "It cleared. They had the theatre booked for the nineteenth. On the third of March, at nine forty in the morning, your office sent it back. That's your authorization on the reversal. That's your signature. I've seen it on our mortgage."

Somebody's fork touched a plate and the sound went off like a gunshot.

"Get her out," Vivian said.

"Do you want me to say it louder for the table?" I couldn't feel my hands. "She had a date. She had a date, Julian, and she asked me if the snow there was cold, and you sent the money back and told me the bank had frozen it and let me sit in that chair for three more weeks watching her—"

"Enough." He stood up.

"Why?" My voice broke in the middle. "Just tell me why. She was six."

And here is the thing I will remember until I die: he answered me. He straightened his cuff and he answered me, reasonably, the way he'd explain a line item to the board.

"Because of where it came from," he said.

"What?"

"That money did not come from us, Nora. We could not fund it. Ashford Group has been covenant-breached since November — you would know that if you had ever once read what you were signing at those meetings. The transfer came from an outside party. An interested party." His jaw moved. "If I let a competitor pay for my daughter's operation, it is on a wire in Frankfurt by lunchtime that an Ashford couldn't cover a family medical bill. The stock was at fourteen. It would have gone through the floor and taken the refinancing with it."

The room had stopped breathing.

"You let her die," I said, "for a share price."

"I have four thousand employees."

"You had one daughter."

He looked at me then, actually looked, for the first time in a year. And what was in his face was not shame. It was irritation. I had raised my voice in front of the Delacroix woman.

"You're overwrought," he said. "Marcus will call you tomorrow about the terms."

Camille started crying. Of course she did. Vivian put a hand over hers and said, "Not in your condition, darling," and looked at me over the candles like something she'd found floating in the pool.

"You've had a loss," she said. "It doesn't make you interesting. Take her out, please."

The two men who came in were the same men who used to lift Lily's wheelchair over the front step.

They were very gentle about it. That was somehow the worst part. One of them said, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Ashford," in the driveway, and he meant it, and he still put me out on the road.

* * *

My card was declined at the gas station on Marlow Street at 8:52 that night.

I tried the second one. Declined. The third came up with a message I'd never seen: ACCOUNT CLOSED — CONTACT ISSUER.

The girl behind the counter looked at me with enormous pity, which is how I found out what I looked like.

I had two hundred and eleven dollars in cash in my coat, because I'd taken it out for the funeral flowers. I had my phone, until it went dark ninety minutes later — the plan was corporate, and somebody at Ashford Group was working late.

And I had a hospital bracelet in my pocket. Cut off her wrist on Tuesday morning. LILY R. ASHFORD, 6Y, and a barcode.

The Marlow Inn wanted sixty-four a night and didn't ask questions. The room smelled like carpet shampoo and someone else's cigarettes. I sat on the end of the bed in my coat until three in the morning without turning on the light, holding a plastic bracelet, and I did not cry, and that frightened me more than crying would have.

At some point I said out loud, to the room: "All right."

Not grief. Something colder and much steadier, and it has not left me since.

If Julian Ashford had let my daughter die to protect a company, then I was going to take the company. Not damage it. Not sue it. Take it, brick by brick, until there was nothing left with his grandfather's name on it, and then I was going to make him watch.

I didn't know how. I had a hundred and forty-seven dollars left and no phone.

But I knew one thing he didn't: somewhere out there was a person who had wired three point two million dollars to a clinic in Zurich for a child they had never met.

And Julian was afraid of them.

* * *

I got sick in the morning.

I put it down to the wine at the wake I hadn't eaten anything with, and then to grief, and then, on the third morning, at 6:15, kneeling on the tile of a motel bathroom for the ninth time in two days with my hair in my fist, I stopped being able to put it down to anything.

The pharmacy on the corner opened at seven.

The test cost eleven dollars. I bought two, because I was already, somewhere underneath everything, doing arithmetic I did not want to be doing.

I sat on the closed lid with the plastic stick balanced on my knee and watched the little window the way you watch a monitor in an ICU.

One line. Then, slowly, unmistakably, a second.

I took the other test. Two lines.

And I sat there in a motel bathroom in a dead woman's coat — that's what it felt like, that's exactly what it felt like — and I counted backwards.

Julian had not touched me since Lily's first cardiac arrest. Eleven months. He had moved into the east wing in June and I had been glad, and by August I hadn't even been sad about it, and there was not one single night in all that time.

Not one.

So I counted back six weeks instead, to a night I had spent eleven months refusing to think about.

The fourteenth floor of the Kingsley Hotel. The night Dr. Aronsen had taken me into the family room and used the words "weeks, not months," and Julian's assistant had called to say he couldn't leave Frankfurt.

A hotel bar because I couldn't go home. A grey-eyed stranger who didn't know my name, didn't ask it, and never once told me his. A man with a scar through his left eyebrow who had looked at me across a whiskey and said, "Whatever it is, you don't have to say it here."

The only hour in eleven months when I had not been in pain.

Room 1204.

I was still sitting on that bathroom floor when I heard a car pull into the motel lot outside and stop, engine running, directly under my window.

Nobody stops at the Marlow Inn at seven in the morning.

I got up and moved the curtain an inch.

A black Bentley, gleaming wet, absurd against the ice machine and the chain-link. A driver already coming around the hood with an umbrella, and behind him a man in a charcoal suit crossing the lot toward my door with a card held out in his hand, like he'd known which door for hours.

I opened it on the chain.

"Mrs. Ashford," he said. "My employer would like ten minutes of your time. He's waiting downtown."

"Who is your employer?"

He handed the card through the gap. Heavy stock, no phone number, three words in black:

KANE HOLDINGS.

Behind me on the bathroom counter lay Deborah's folded paper, and I already knew — I knew before I turned around, before I crossed the room, before I smoothed the page flat with a hand that had started to shake — what was printed in the payer field of a three-point-two-million-dollar transfer that my husband had sent back on the third of March.

The same three words.