Chapter 12: One Last Conversation
Victoria was being held at a federal processing facility outside Richmond pending a bail hearing.
Raymond had arranged a brief visit through her court-appointed liaison.
Twenty minutes.
No recording.
Her attorney would be present.
I drove alone.
The room they put us in was small and fluorescent-lit, with a table and four chairs and a window that looked out onto a concrete corridor.
Victoria was already seated when I came in.
She was wearing her own clothes — they hadn't processed her yet — and her posture was exactly what it had always been.
Straight.
Composed.
The pearls were gone.
Her attorney, a young man I didn't recognize, sat to her left with a legal pad.
I sat across from her.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
"You didn't have to come," she said.
"I know."
"Then why did you?"
I looked at her.
In the flat light of the room, she looked older than she had the night I came home.
Or maybe she had always looked this way and the house, the silk dress, the champagne had been doing work I hadn't noticed.
"I wanted to ask you something," I said.
She waited.
"Did you ever actually believe it?" I said.
"That what you were doing was for me?"
She held my gaze.
"Yes."
"Even the warehouse."
"The records in that warehouse would have led you to things about your father's business that would have destroyed your faith in him.
I made a decision to protect you from that."
"By destroying evidence."
"By protecting you."
"Victoria." I leaned forward slightly.
"Dad left me a letter.
He told me what you were.
He told me he didn't have the courage to stop you while he was alive." I paused.
"He was afraid of you."
Something moved across her face.
Not guilt.
Something more complicated than guilt.
"Robert was a good man," she said quietly.
"He was also a weak one.
He built something extraordinary and then spent the last decade of his life being afraid it would be taken from him.
I was trying to make sure it wasn't."
"By taking it yourself."
"By securing it." Her voice didn't rise.
"By making sure that when something happened to you — and in your world, Daniel, something always eventually happens — there would be a structure in place that protected what you built.
That protected your child."
"You thr\*atened my child."
"Sims exceeded—"
"Don't." My voice came out flat and final.
"Don't say he exceeded his instructions again.
You hired him knowing what he was.
You kept him on knowing what he had done.
Whatever he did, you chose to let it continue."
Her mouth closed.
"I have one more question," I said.
She waited.
"Was any of it real?" I said.
"When I was a child.
When you held my face in your hands after Dad died and told me I was the only man you'd ever truly trusted.
Was any of that real?"
The fluorescent light hummed.
Victoria looked at me for a long time.
Her hands were folded on the table.
Her posture didn't change.
But something in her eyes did — a shift, a softening, the first thing I had seen on her face all night that I recognized from my childhood.
"All of it was real," she said.
"That's the part you won't understand.
I loved you and I did all of this.
Both things are true."
I stood up.
"Goodbye, Victoria," I said.
She looked up at me.
"Will you bring the baby to see me?
When it comes?"
I picked up my jacket from the back of the chair.
"I don't know," I said.
It was the most honest answer I had.
I walked out.
Her attorney said something behind me.
I didn't hear it.
May you like
I walked down the concrete corridor and through two sets of security doors and out into the afternoon air, and I stood in the parking lot for a moment with my hands in my pockets and my face turned up toward the sky.
Then I got in the car and drove home.
