Chapter 5: The Husband Who Came North
Harrison arrived in Burlington at four-seventeen in the afternoon.
Clare knew because Eleanor's phone rang — a blocked number — and when Eleanor answered and said nothing, they heard road noise and Harrison's voice saying, "I know you're with her.
Put Clare on."
Eleanor held the phone out.
Clare took it.
"Where are you?" Harrison said.
"Burlington."
A pause.
"I'm twenty minutes out.
Don't do anything until I get there."
"I'm not doing anything, Harrison.
I'm sitting in an attorney's office."
The pause this time was longer.
"Whose attorney?"
"Thomas Aldrich.
Your father's attorney."
She heard the sound of a turn signal.
A lane change.
Harrison recalibrating in real time.
"Clare, whatever he's told you, there are things you don't understand about my father's estate.
It's complicated.
There are reasons—"
"I've read the letter."
Silence.
"All twelve pages," she said.
"Clare—"
"And I've spoken to the board chair of Mercer House Hospitality.
Did you know your father kept his personal number in the letter?
He said to call if anything happened to the second will." She hadn't made that call yet.
But she would.
"He's expecting to hear from me."
The road noise stopped.
Harrison had pulled over.
"Do not call Gerald Foss." His voice had changed.
The careful husband tone was gone.
"That is not a conversation you want to start."
"Why not?"
"Because you are thirty-one weeks pregnant, you have been traveling alone in the snow, and you are about to blow up our family over a document my father wrote when he was on medication and not thinking clearly."
Clare looked at Eleanor across the table.
"Your father was thinking very clearly," Clare said.
"He just wasn't thinking about you."
She ended the call.
Aldrich was already on his feet.
"He'll come here first."
"I know." Clare stood.
"Let him."
Harrison walked through the office door nineteen minutes later.
He was still in the coat from Christmas Eve.
He hadn't slept.
Clare could see it in the skin beneath his eyes, in the way his jaw was set too tight.
He stopped when he saw Eleanor.
Something moved across his face.
Not guilt.
Calculation.
"Eleanor." His voice was controlled.
"I don't know what you've told my wife—"
"She told me the truth," Clare said.
"Sit down, Harrison."
"I'm not going to sit down.
We're going home."
"No."
He stepped toward her.
"Clare, you're not well.
You've been traveling alone, you haven't slept, you're in your third trimester—"
"Don't." The word came out flat and final.
"Don't make this about my health.
Not again."
He stopped.
"You paid your sister forty thousand dollars to stop existing," Clare said.
"You had your father's will rewritten within a week of his funeral.
You threatened to cut off his medical care if he contacted Eleanor.
And you recorded yourself discussing all of it in his study, which he wired before you knew what he was doing."
Harrison looked at Aldrich.
A long, assessing look.
"Whatever you think you have—" he started.
"The recording is in a storage unit on Williston Road," Aldrich said calmly.
"Along with twenty years of company records and the original signed copy of the second will.
I have a duplicate of the will in this office.
A third copy is held by a colleague in New York."
Harrison sat down.
Not because anyone asked him to.
His legs simply made the decision.
"This isn't what it looks like," he said.
But his voice had lost its shape.
"Then tell me what it looks like," Clare said.
"Because from where I'm sitting, it looks like you've spent two years stealing from your own sister and lying to your pregnant wife.
And I want to hear you explain that."
Harrison looked at her.
For the first time since Christmas Eve, he looked at her directly, without deflection, without the careful management she had mistaken for love.
"The company would have been destroyed," he said.
"Eleanor had no experience.
No understanding of what it took to build what my father built.
Splitting it would have—"
"That wasn't your decision to make," Eleanor said.
It was the first time she had spoken since Harrison walked in.
Her voice was quiet.
It landed harder than anything else in the room.
Harrison had no answer.
His phone buzzed on the table.
He looked down at it.
His expression changed.
"That's Gerald Foss," he said slowly.
"Why is Gerald Foss calling me?"
Clare picked up her own phone and showed him the outgoing call log.
She had called the board chair twenty minutes before Harrison arrived.
Harrison stared at the screen.
"You said you hadn't called him yet."
"I said he was expecting to hear from me.
I didn't say I hadn't already called."
Harrison stood up.
His chair scraped back hard.
"This is not over," he said.
"You have a document my father wrote while he was dying.
My attorneys will have it challenged within the week.
Eleanor signed an agreement.
That agreement is binding.
And you—" he pointed at Clare— "are my wife.
Anything you think you're doing here, you're doing to yourself too."
He walked out.
The door didn't slam.
That was almost worse.
Aldrich waited until the footsteps on the stairs faded.
"He'll call his attorneys tonight," he said.
"I know," Clare said.
"It will get harder before it gets easier."
"I know that too."
Eleanor reached across the table and put her hand over Clare's.
May you like
Neither of them said anything.
Outside, it had started snowing again.
