Chapter 12: One Glass
Three weeks later, Marguerite stood in the library of her Greenwich estate.
The bankers' boxes were gone.
The documents were back in the filing cabinet, now fitted with a new lock and a monitored alarm.
The library smelled the way it always had — old paper, lemon oil, the faint trace of the pipe her husband had given up twenty years ago but whose ghost still lived in the curtains.
Weston had called that morning.
He was in the city, back at work, moving through the ordinary days that follow extraordinary ones.
He called every morning now.
Not long calls — five minutes, sometimes less.
Just enough to say he was there.
"Are you all right?" he asked, which was what he asked every morning.
"I'm all right," she said, which was becoming more true each time she said it.
"Franklin says the state attorney's office has opened a formal investigation."
"I know.
He told me."
"And Dominic's divorce was finalized last week.
He sent a note."
"I know that too."
A pause.
"Mom.
I'm sorry.
For the corridor.
For telling you not to make yourself the center of attention."
"Weston—"
"I've been trying to find a better way to say it.
I don't think there is one.
I'm just sorry."
She looked at the library table.
At the chair where Priscilla had sat with her financial advisor, so confident, so certain.
At the window where the November garden was bare and quiet and entirely itself.
"You were in love," she said.
"And you were trying to protect what you loved.
I understand that."
"I should have protected you."
"You did.
In the end, you did."
She heard him exhale.
"Come for dinner Sunday," she said.
"Dorothea is coming.
I'll make the lamb."
"I'll be there."
After she hung up, she stood in the library for a moment longer.
Then she went to the kitchen.
She opened a bottle of the Burgundy she and her husband had been saving — a 2009, from a case they had bought on their anniversary trip, the one they had promised each other they would open for something worth celebrating.
She poured one glass.
She set the bottle on the counter and looked at it for a moment.
Then she picked up the glass and walked to the window that looked out over the garden — the bare roses, the stone path, the oak tree her husband had planted the year Weston was born.
She stood there in the quiet of her own house, in the life she had built and kept and refused to surrender, and drank her wine.
The oak tree held its branches against the gray sky, patient and rooted and entirely unmoved by everything that had tried to uproot it.
She finished the glass.
She washed it.
Dried it.
Set it back in the cabinet.
Then she sat down at her husband's desk, opened her notebook to a clean page, and began to write him a letter she would never send — the kind she had written every month since he passed, just to keep the conversation going.
*My love,* she wrote.
*You would have hated every minute of it.
And you would have been so proud.*
---
Some things cannot be taken from you — not your name, not your mind, not the life you built with someone you loved.
Marguerite never forgot that.
Neither should we.
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