Chapter 5 - The Apartment Was Mine
At nine the next morning, Callum arrived at my apartment with a garment bag, a lawyer and the expression of a man who thought the sight of him would rearrange my priorities.
Julian was there. So was Luis, at my request, to document the collection and keep the building staff out of the dispute. We had agreed that Callum could remove his personal clothes and property, not that he could wander through my filing cabinets.
“You're treating me like a criminal,” Callum said.
“I'm treating this like a property collection,” I answered. “Take your shoes out of my closet and let's keep the day ordinary.”
He glanced at Julian. “Does she rehearse these lines with you?”
“Only when I charge by the hour,” Julian said.
Callum went into the bedroom. I waited by the kitchen table, where a burn mark from an old pan had survived two attempts at sanding. I remembered the night I'd made it: Callum and I had eaten pasta sitting on the floor because we'd lost the table screws. He'd told me he loved that I could laugh at a mistake.
Later he would use every mistake as evidence I couldn't manage my own life.
When he returned with the garment bag, I asked about the blue archival box.
“I moved some papers for safekeeping.”
“Where?”
“At the office.”
“Those notebooks belong to my family.”
“Your grandfather's lawyers will tell you the designs belong to the trust. Don't flatter yourself.”
“I didn't say they belonged to me. I said you weren't entitled to remove them.”
His lawyer cleared his throat. “We'll arrange a return if they're identified as separate property.”
“Good,” Julian said. “Please preserve the box and its contents in their present condition. We'll send a formal request.”
Callum looked from one of us to the other. “You used to be fun, Sloane.”
“I used to mistake being easy to control for being easy to love.”
He left without answering. I watched from the window as his car joined traffic and felt neither triumphant nor devastated. I felt tired enough to sleep for a week.
Tessa arrived an hour later with sandwiches. She'd heard about the missing box from Julian, who'd called with my permission because she'd helped catalog the notebooks during our marriage.
“I know you don't owe me another favor,” I said.
“I'm here because you're terrible at lunch,” she replied.
We sat at the small green table and ate. She told me she'd applied for an administrative job at a community theater. The pay was lower than at Ashford, but the director had actually read her résumé instead of asking which prominent family she knew.
“Do you want me to call them?” I asked.
“No.”
I winced. “Right. Sorry.”
“I'm happy to be your friend,” Tessa said. “Please don't turn it into your next charity project.”
She was right. I asked about the theater instead. It needed a new soundboard, had lost its basement to a flood and was staging an astonishingly bad version of a classic comedy. Tessa smiled as she talked. I realized how rarely I'd heard her discuss a life outside my calendar.
After lunch, I called Nora at River Street. She confirmed that the company had paid the workers for the current week, but the termination notices were still ready to print.
“Don't promise anything you can't do,” she said before I could speak.
“I won't. I have a vote tomorrow.”
“Then vote like somebody's rent depends on it. Because it does.”
My mother had left me one letter before she died, which I kept folded into an old cookbook. I read it that afternoon, not because it contained a legal secret but because I needed to remember who I was without a ballroom. She'd written that the worst thing about rich families was how efficiently they could turn other people's needs into inconveniences. She'd told me to be useful before trying to be admired.
At four, Olivia called. The independent directors had received my objection. The challenged consent had been removed from the vote tally pending authentication, but the sale proposal itself remained on the agenda.
“We need to know who owns Harrow Capital,” I said.
“So do I,” she replied. “Management supplied a corporate registry extract without the ultimate beneficial ownership statement. I've demanded the full disclosure before the meeting.”
At six, Rita sent an initial reconciliation. The River Street sales entity had recorded the prepaid coat orders, but production costs had been assigned to the workshop without corresponding revenue. It didn't prove a crime. It meant the profit-and-loss sheet the board had seen was materially incomplete.
I asked her to document the method. A director who disagreed with me should still be able to reproduce the math.
Then my grandfather called.
“I've been thinking about Eleanor,” he said.
I braced myself.
“She had a partner when she started designing. Agnes Hollis.”
“Nora told me.”
“Agnes deserved more credit than she got.”
“How much more?”
Everett paused. “I don't know the full answer.”
“Then we should find out.”
“Opening that question could complicate the trust's licensing rights.”
I looked around my kitchen. The apartment I'd paid for before Callum ever walked through its door was still here. The name on the mailbox was mine. I had survived learning that ownership wasn't the same thing as safety.
“Maybe the rights need complicating,” I said.
Everett didn't answer for a while. Finally, he said, “I'll cooperate.”
At eight thirty, Samira sent the final board agenda. The proposed sale would be presented as an urgent liquidity measure. My proxy revocation was recorded. I had been granted observer status for the relevant discussion, subject to confidentiality restrictions. Nothing guaranteed I could persuade anyone.
Another file came through a minute later: the corporate secretary's preliminary conflict-of-interest report. It identified an undisclosed minority investor in Harrow Capital, the company trying to buy the factory cheaply.
The investor was a family office controlled by Margaret Ashford.
May you like
I called Julian.
“Tomorrow,” I said, “we make them explain why the woman who told me I wasn't fit to manage my own marriage is trying to purchase the jobs of eighty-four people.”
