Chapter 7: Nathaniel
They took Julian through a side corridor.
Genevieve went with a second agent, separately, which told me the investigators had been careful about keeping them from coordinating their accounts.
My father had briefed them well.
The room exhaled.
Not loudly.
These were people who had spent their lives learning to absorb shocks without showing them.
But the quartet had stopped playing at some point during Julian's conversation with the federal agent, and no one had asked them to start again, and in that quiet I could hear the specific sound of four hundred people recalibrating.
Reginald Holt appeared at my father's side.
"Edmund," he said.
"I owe you a conversation."
"You owe Eleanor a conversation," my father said.
"I'll be with my granddaughter."
He walked away toward the dessert table.
Holt turned to me.
"I should have called you back," he said.
"When Prescott reached out, I should have—"
"You didn't respond to him," I said.
"That's enough for now."
He nodded.
He looked relieved, and then slightly ashamed of looking relieved, and then he straightened up.
"What do you need from the board?"
"A meeting.
Next week.
I'll have our attorney send the agenda."
"You'll have it." He paused.
"Your father never lost faith in you.
I want you to know that.
Even when you were—"
"Gone," I said.
"Yes."
"I know," I said.
"I wasn't ready before."
He accepted that and moved away.
I found Nathaniel still at table four.
He had not run.
I had wondered if he would.
But he was seated exactly where Harrison had placed him, his hands flat on the table, his glass empty.
He was sixty-three years old and he had my mother's jaw and none of her warmth, and he had spent the last three years helping a man use my daughter's name to dismantle everything my mother's family had built.
I sat down across from him.
He didn't speak first.
"Why?" I asked.
"Eleanor—"
"I'm not asking for a legal answer.
I'm asking why."
He looked at his hands.
"Your grandfather left me forty percent less than your mother.
Did you know that?"
"Yes."
"She never said anything about it.
Never offered to—"
"She died, Nathaniel.
She died when I was nine."
He flinched.
Small, but real.
"The estate should have been restructured after she passed," he said.
"Your father never—"
"My father was grieving," I said.
"And you waited until his daughter was married and distracted and then you found a man who was already planning to betray her and you helped him do it more efficiently."
He didn't answer.
"You put your name on a document that used Maya," I said.
"She's five years old.
She has nothing to do with grandfather's will."
"It was only a legal mechanism—"
"She has two teeth missing," I said.
"From this afternoon.
From the woman you helped Julian bring into our home."
The table was very quiet.
"I didn't know about that," he said.
"I believe you," I said.
"It doesn't change what you did."
He looked up.
"What happens now?"
"Our attorney will contact you tomorrow.
The filing you signed is the center of the civil matter.
You'll need your own representation." I stood up.
"I'd suggest someone who doesn't work for Julian."
"Eleanor." He said it the way people say a name when they want it to function as an apology.
I looked at him.
"My mother would have been very sad," I said.
"Not angry.
Sad."
I left him at the table.
May you like
His glass was still empty.
He didn't reach for the bottle.
