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

Chapter 3: Room 1204

The car did not go downtown.

It went to the water — to the black glass tower at the end of Pier Nine that everyone in this city calls the Blade, and that nobody I knew had ever been inside.

The lobby was empty at seven-forty in the morning except for two security men who did not ask my name. The elevator had no buttons. It simply went up, for a long time, while I stood in a wet funeral coat and stared at my own reflection: hollow, grey, hair scraped back, three days past the worst thing that will ever happen to me.

The doors opened onto a floor with no walls. Just glass, the harbour going silver in the rain, and a single figure standing with his back to me at the far end.

"Mrs. Ashford." He didn't turn. "You didn't eat anything at the motel. There's breakfast on the table. Sit down before you fall down."

"Who are you?"

"Someone who has spent six weeks looking for you."

There was a folder on the table beside the coffee. My name on it. And under my name, in smaller type, LILY R. ASHFORD — CLINIC FILE.

I sat down. Not because I was told to. Because my legs went.

"You wired the money," I said.

"Yes."

"To a clinic in Switzerland. For a child you had never met."

"Yes."

"Three point two million dollars."

"Four point one," he said. "Three point two for the procedure. The rest was for the year afterwards. Cardiac transplant patients need a great deal of care in the first twelve months and I was told the family's insurance had lapsed."

I put both hands flat on the table.

"Why?"

He turned around then.

I want to be honest about what happened in my chest, because it is the only reason any of what came after makes sense.

He was tall, and his suit was very plain, and he was perhaps thirty-five, and his eyes were the grey of the harbour behind him, and there was a thin white scar running up through his left eyebrow where it did not grow back.

I had traced that scar with my thumb, once, in the dark, on the fourteenth floor of the Kingsley Hotel.

The room went sideways.

"You," I said.

"Damian Kane." He watched me the way you watch a glass you have just knocked toward the edge of a table. "Yes."

"Room 1204."

"Room 1204."

"I didn't—" My voice came out wrong. "I never told you my name."

"No. You told me you had a daughter with a hole in her heart and a doctor in Zurich who'd take her if the money came by the end of the month, and then you fell asleep, and you were gone before six." He said it evenly, but there was something under it, held down hard. "You left a hospital parking receipt in the ashtray of the bar. Mercy General, eighth floor. It took my people five days to work out which child on that ward had a Zurich referral. I wired it that Friday."

"And Julian sent it back."

"Julian sent it back," he said, "on the third of March, at nine forty in the morning, seventeen minutes after his chief counsel identified my name on the originating account."

I couldn't get any air in.

"He knew it was you."

"He knew it was me." Kane pulled out the chair opposite and sat, forearms on his knees, and for the first time he looked away from me. "I have spent four years buying the debt Ashford Group could not service. On the third of March I owned enough of it that your husband's board would have had to disclose my position. If he had accepted that transfer, every man in that building would have understood that Ashford was taking money from the man at the gate." A pause. "I did not think of it. That is the thing I have to live with. I saw a child on a ward and I sent money like it was a wire transfer, and I never once considered that a man might rather bury his daughter than admit who paid the bill."

The rain went across the glass in long grey sheets.

"Say the rest of it," I said.

"The rest of it?"

"You didn't put a car outside a motel at seven in the morning to apologize to me. Men like you and men like him don't do anything for one reason. Say the rest."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. Recognition.

"Ashford Group has six weeks of liquidity," he said. "Perhaps seven. On the twenty-ninth their revolving facility comes up for renewal and the syndicate will not renew it, because I have bought eleven of the fourteen positions in that syndicate. When it fails, the family trust that holds the founding block goes into forced review."

"And you want the company."

"I want the company." He leaned forward. "But the founding block is thirty-one percent, and the trust splits it. Vivian votes nine. Julian votes ten. And twelve percent — twelve, Mrs. Ashford — is held by an instrument written by his grandfather in 1961, which vests the voting right in the wife of the sitting heir. Not the heir. The wife. Old money is superstitious about bloodlines; the man wanted the mothers of his great-grandchildren to have a hand on the wheel."

I stared at him.

"I don't own any shares. I've never owned anything. There was a prenuptial—"

"You don't own them. You vote them." He said each word separately, so it would land. "For as long as the marriage stands. Your husband filed for dissolution on the third of March and the first hearing is on the twentieth. Under state law nothing severs until the court enters it."

The coffee cooled between us.

"Eleven days," I said.

"Eleven days," said Damian Kane. "For eleven more days, you are the largest single voting bloc in the company that let your daughter die. Julian has not realised it yet. His mother has. That is why your cards stopped working on Tuesday night, and why your phone died, and why there is a man from Hale & Rowe sitting in the Marlow Inn parking lot right now with a settlement he wants you to sign this morning while you're too tired to read it."

Something happened behind my ribs. Not grief. Not even rage.

Arithmetic.

"What do you want from me?"

"I want you to vote."

"And in exchange?"

"Everything he took." He didn't blink. "The house is trust property; I can put you back in it inside a month. The medical debt in your name — eight hundred and forty thousand — is gone by tonight either way, I did that before you got in the car. And when the block goes to forced review, I will make sure the seat that opens is yours."

"And the price," I said. "There's always a price. Say that too."

For the first time, he hesitated.

"There's a condition in my own trust," he said. "Written by a man just as superstitious as Julian's grandfather. A Kane cannot vote a controlling interest in a public company unless he is married. My grandfather wanted heirs and he thought a wedding ring would produce them faster than a request."

The rain. The harbour. Three days since I put white roses on a small casket.

"You're joking."

"I have never once been accused of that." He stood, and went to the window, and said it to the glass. "A contract. Two years, terminable at your instruction after the vote. Separate residences if you want them. I'll have Rakes draw it so that you're protected against me as thoroughly as you were unprotected against him."

"Why me?" My voice was not steady. "You could marry anyone in this city."

He turned his head.

"Because he sat at a dinner table on the day he buried her," he said quietly, "and you walked in soaking wet and put the paper down in front of eleven people. Because I have been in a room with Julian Ashford four times and I have never seen him afraid, and on Tuesday night, when his mother called me about your voting rights, I heard him in the background of that call, and he was afraid." A beat. "And because you already know what you're going to say."

He was right. That was the obscene part. I had known since the elevator.

"Before Friday," he said. "The dissolution can be accelerated if they move for it, and Vivian Ashford has never in her life waited a full eleven days for anything."

I stood up.

I had a hundred and forty-seven dollars, a hospital bracelet in my coat pocket, and a plan that had lasted exactly three days, and now a man who owned half this city's debt was offering me my husband's empire in exchange for a signature.

"All right," I said. "Friday."

He put out his hand. I took it, and his grip was warm and dry and absolutely steady, and his eyes came down to mine for one second longer than a business arrangement needs.

"Whatever it is," he said, "you don't have to say it here."

The same words. The same voice. The fourteenth floor of the Kingsley Hotel, six weeks ago.

I made myself let go of his hand.

Because in the other pocket of my coat, folded inside a pharmacy bag with the receipt still stapled to it, were two plastic sticks with two pink lines each — and eleven months of separate bedrooms that meant only one man on this earth could be the father.

And he was standing three feet away from me, talking about a wedding.