PART 8:

It rang once. “Where are you?” Not a question. Seline’s voice at 6:00 in the morning had the particular quality of someone who had been awake for hours managing a situation. crisp, slightly too controlled with the specific register of a woman who had married into one of New York’s oldest families the previous evening and was now dealing with the fact that her sister had apparently left the reception to be photographed outside a subway station with Lucian Veil.

I’m safe, Ava said. That’s not what I asked. It’s the only answer I have right now. A pause. She could hear background sounds on Selen’s end. Hotel sounds, a door closing, the soft indeterminate noise of an expensive room in a pre-dawn hour. Presumably, Seline was in the Ashccraftoft Grand’s honeymoon suite, which meant this phone call was happening 6 hours into her wedding night, and that told Ava something about the relative priority of situations.

There are photos everywhere, Selene said, of you and Vale outside the 14th Street Station. You look like Ava. Your face. I fell. You didn’t fall. I fell. Ava said again more flatly. Another pause. Different quality this time. Softer around the edges in a way that Seline’s pauses almost never were. Are you hurt? Seline said. Yes.

Badly? No. The silence that followed was the kind they’d been having their entire lives. The silence of two women who had grown up in the same house and learned entirely different survival strategies for it and then spent 20 years wondering if those strategies had cost them something with each other that they couldn’t fully recover.

Dad called me this morning. Selene said at 5. What did he say? He wants to know where you are. He said it’s important. He said she stopped. He said there are legal complications and he needs to talk to you directly before before what? He didn’t finish the sentence. Ava sat up. Her ribs announced themselves.

She pushed her feet to the floor and looked out the window at the river, gray and wide in the early morning light, moving the way it always moved. Indifferent, constant, going south regardless. Seline, she said, I need to ask you something and I need you to answer me honestly. Ava, did you know about the Civic Trust? The silence this time was different from all the previous silences. It had a shape.

Ava felt it the way you felt the shape of a room in the dark. Not by seeing it, but by what it pushed back. What about the trust? Selene said carefully. Did you know what Dad was using it for? I don’t know what you mean. Yes, you do. Her voice came out flat and certain, and she was surprised by it.

The certainty of it, the absence of the usual apologetic softening she applied to accusations. You know exactly what I mean. Did you know? The pause went on long enough that Ava could hear Seline breathing. I knew things weren’t entirely. Seline stopped, started again. I knew Dad had made some arrangements that were Seline.

I didn’t know about your account, Selene said fast. I swear I didn’t know about your account specifically. The window, the river. Ava’s hand on the phone tightening until her knuckles felt the pressure. But you knew about the rest, she said. Nothing. How long? Ava said. Ava, please. How long did you know? 3 years, Selene said very quietly.

I found out 3 years ago. 3 years. Ava did not say anything for a long moment. 3 years ago was when she’d ended things with Lucien. 3 years ago was when she’d made her decision about his world in her world and the distance between them. She’d done it partly because she’d been afraid. Afraid of what it meant to be close to a man whose life operated in the spaces where consequences didn’t apply to everyone equally.

She’d told herself she was making the clean choice, the honest choice. She had chosen her family’s world over his. Her family’s world, it turned out, had been operating in those same spaces the entire time. They just had better clothes and a letterhead. You got married last night, Ava said, with this knowledge. Henry doesn’t know anything. I’m not talking about Henry.

I’m talking about you. You stood up there last night in front of 400 people and smiled and you’ve known for three years that our father was using me as she stopped herself. Did you tell him when you found out about the trust? Did you tell dad that you knew? A pause. He asked me not to say anything.

He asked you. He said he was handling it. He said it was almost done. That the exposure was minimal. That there was a plan. Was I the plan? Seline. Silence. Was I the plan? I don’t know. Her sister’s voice had gone thin. I don’t know what he was planning to do about your account. I told myself there was nothing linking you to it directly. That you were 19.

That no one could seriously uh stop. Ava closed her eyes. Stop explaining what you told yourself. She ended the call. She sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in her lap and looked at the floor and did not cry. There was something past crying happening in her chest. Something with less water and more stone, heavy and clarifying and without the relief that crying sometimes brought.

She’d had two people in her life she’d called family. One had built a legal trap around her. One had known about it for 3 years and said nothing. She stood up, set the phone on the dresser, and opened the bedroom door. The apartment was quiet in the particular way of early morning, all lowg gray light and the smell of coffee from somewhere.

👉 [Tap here for the Next Part ] 👈