My Sister Wore My Wedding Dress · Ava Sterling

Chapter 3: The Renewal

He didn't sit down for four full seconds.

"Eve."

"Ms. Marsh, in this building." I opened the folder. "Priyanka Rao, our co-head. Mr. Vance is COO at Whitlock and a member of their credit committee. Priyanka, would you take us through the position?"

She did. Fifteen minutes, no adjectives. Kestrel holds sixty-one percent of the senior facility. The facility matures on the nineteenth of September. On current covenants Whitlock will breach the leverage test at the Q3 measurement date, which is eleven days before maturity, and a breach at that point gives the syndicate the right to demand repayment in full.

Adrian took notes for the first six minutes and then stopped, because there's no point taking notes when you've understood.

"You've been buying us for a year," he said.

"Fourteen months."

"That's not a market position. That's a siege."

"It's a market position that had the enormous good fortune of being taken against a company run by people who don't read the paperwork," I said. "You over-levered twice into an asset that was priced for a recovery that didn't happen. Nobody made you do that, Adrian. I wasn't in the room."

His jaw moved.

"Your father—"

"Isn't in this room either." I closed the folder. "Here's where we are. The fund will consider a renewal at revised terms. Revised means: two board seats for the lender, a covenant reset at a level you can actually hold, and the departure of the Chief Operating Officer, because no credit committee on earth is going to sign a fresh facility for a company whose operating officer got the job through a marriage and has closed one deal in five years, and that one lost forty million."

Priyanka, to her great credit, did not look up.

"That's personal," Adrian said quietly.

"It's on page nine." I slid it across. "Every one of those numbers has been in your own annual filings for two years. If it reads as personal, that's not because I wrote it. It's because it's true and nobody in your life has ever said it out loud to you."

He looked at the page for a long time.

"Eve," he said. "Five years. Can I—"

"No."

"Just—"

"Mr. Vance." I stood up. "You have until the fifth of August to bring me a proposal from your board. If it doesn't include a change of operating management, we'll decline the renewal and you'll spend September explaining an insolvency to three hundred employees, four of whom I hired myself. Priyanka will walk you out."

* * *

He was waiting downstairs at six o'clock.

Not in the lobby — outside, across the street, in the rain, like a man in a film who has had two hours to think about how this looks.

"Ten minutes," he said, coming across. "Not about the facility. I swear to God, Eve, not one word about the facility."

"I'm collecting my son at six fifteen."

I heard it come out of my mouth. Four years of discipline, and the word just walked out of me in the street because I was tired and because for two hours I had been someone who says exactly what she means.

Adrian stopped dead on the kerb.

"Your son," he said.

"Yes."

"You've got a son."

"That's usually what it means."

He stood there in the rain doing arithmetic, and I watched him get to the answer and then, because he is who he is, watched him decide not to ask it.

"How old?" he said instead, which is the same question wearing a coat.

"Four."

Something went out of his face.

"Eve—"

"His name is Theo and he's four and he's mine," I said, "and if the next sentence out of your mouth is a question, you should understand that it will be the most expensive sentence you have ever spoken, because it will end this conversation and every future one, and the next voice you hear from me will be through Priyanka."

The rain came down between us.

"Then I'm not going to ask," Adrian said.

"Good."

"I'm going to tell you something instead, and then I'll go." He put his hands in his pockets. "Cara isn't pregnant."

"I don't care about—"

"She never was," he said.

The traffic went past. Somebody's umbrella caught my shoulder and the man said sorry and kept walking.

"What?"

"In June, five years ago. Eleven weeks." His voice had gone flat and strange. "There was never a pregnancy, Eve. I found out in the November after we married, from a nurse at a clinic in Charleston who thought I already knew, and I have never been able to prove it and I have never been able to unknow it."

I could hear a ringing in my ears.

"She was three months along at our wedding," I said. "Everyone said. She had a — she had a scan, my mother had the picture in her handbag for a year—"

"She had a scan," Adrian agreed. "In September. Which is not eleven weeks after April."

I stood in the rain outside my own office and did the sum I should have done five years earlier and had never once done, because when you are twenty-eight and your family cuts you out of a church you do not sit down with a calendar.

"Nathan was born in March," I said. "Nine months after September."

"Nine months after September," he said.

"So in June—"

"In June there was nothing." His voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. "She called your father at eleven o'clock at night and told him there was a baby, and he made a decision inside four hours, and by the morning there were flights booked and a story ready and the two of us were four hundred miles away being told what had already been agreed."

* * *

I did not go home.

I collected Theo, and I fed him, and I read him two chapters of a book about a mole with a submarine, and I sat on the floor outside his room for a long time after he went to sleep.

Then I called my mother, for the first time in five years.

She answered on the second ring, which told me she still had my number under my name.

"Eve." Her voice went up and then down again. "Oh. Oh, love."

"Mum. One question and then you can decide whether you ever want to talk to me again." I closed my eyes. "The scan photograph you carried in your handbag. When did Cara give it to you?"

There was a silence on the line long enough that I heard a clock in a house I hadn't stood in for five years.

"Why?" she said.

"When."

"The autumn," my mother said. "September, I think. Perhaps October."

"And in June? When Dad came back from the church, when the two of you decided which daughter it was going to be — did anybody in that house ever see a single piece of paper?"

The clock ticked twice.

"No," my mother said. "We took her word for it."

I put my head back against Theo's bedroom door.

"Eve," she said. "Eve, what have you done? Your father had a letter this morning. He's been in the study since ten o'clock and he won't come out. There's a fund taking his facility and he says they've asked for board seats and Adrian's job—"

"Yes," I said. "I know. I'm the fund."