Lily said it with the careful accuracy of someone reciting something she’d been told, but I think it would be better if she was also just here. Victoria had no response to that. There wasn’t one. She just looked at the little girl and felt something she hadn’t expected. Something that arrived without warning, like a hand pressed flat against the inside of her chest.
“Yeah,” she said finally. “I think that, too. When Ethan came back in from the porch, he found the meeting in silence, but it was a different kind of silence than it had been when he left. He looked at Lily. He looked at Victoria. He didn’t ask. The days settled into an uneasy routine. Ethan drove into Milbrook 3 days a week to run jobs with Marcus and Pete.
He’d been clear from the start that the company didn’t stop. On the other days, he worked remotely, handling estimates and scheduling from the house’s large kitchen table, which he’d commandeered as a workspace, and which drove Victoria’s housekeeper, Donna, quietly insane because he left coffee rings on it, despite having been shown where the coasters were multiple times.
Victoria left early and came home late and spent the hours in between navigating what she described to Ethan in their occasional kitchen conversations as a controlled corporate war. The board had three factions. The first was loyal to Victoria. The second was waiting to see which way the wind blew. The third, led by a board member named Franklin Graves, who had been with Sterling Capital since before Victoria was born, and had clearly expected to inherit more power when Richard died, was actively working against her.
“Graves is moving money,” Victoria said one evening, standing at the kitchen counter with a glass of wine she’d been intending to drink for an hour. He’s been quietly building relationships with two of the institutional investors. If he can flip them, he might be able to challenge my voting authority.
Ethan, who had been reviewing invoices on the other side of the table, looked up. What does he actually want? Control. Officially, he wants to restructure the board’s oversight role. Practically, he wants to run the company without me in the way. Could he do it? Not while I have voting chairs, but the marriage clause. She stopped.
That’s why the clause exists, Ethan said. It wasn’t a question. He’d been thinking about it. Your father put it in to force a demonstration of stability. But Graves could argue that a hasty marriage to someone outside your world is itself an instability. Victoria looked at him. Yes, exactly. So, me being a moving guy isn’t ideal.
It’s not ideal, she admitted. But you being my husband is more valuable than the optics of your career. The clause requires marriage. It doesn’t specify to whom. You’ve thought about this a lot. I think about everything a lot. It’s my primary flaw. She finally drank some of the wine. The plan is for you to accompany me to the quarterly investor dinner in 3 weeks.
It needs to be convincing. Define convincing. Comfortable. Familiar. like a couple who chose each other rather than a couple reading from a script. She looked at him. That’s going to require some practice. You want to practice being married. I want to practice being comfortable in the same room in front of people who are looking for cracks.
She said it briskly the way she said most things. There’s a difference. Ethan considered this. Dinner. He said, “Tomorrow night, you, me, Lily, no work, no phones, just dinner and whatever comes after. We see what it’s like to be normal.” She blinked slightly. “Normal?” “Yeah, normal, like people. I know how to be normal.
Do you?” She opened her mouth and closed it. Then, surprisingly, the corners of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile, but something adjacent to one. tomorrow, she said. Fine. They had pasta again because Lily had requested it, and Ethan had learned not to argue with Lily’s food opinions. He cooked while Victoria stood at the island, initially offering to help in the awkward way of someone who didn’t cook and knew it, then eventually drifting into conversation as he worked.
They talked about his father’s moving company, how he’d started helping as a teenager, how he’d taken it over after his father’s heart attack, how he’d built the client base slowly over 6 years. She listened without interrupting, which was not something he’d expected. You’re good at that, she said.
At what? Listening to people who need someone to handle something carefully, she gestured vaguely. At the estate, you handled everything like it mattered. It did matter to you. Most people in your position would just see boxes. Most people in my position have seen enough grieving families to know boxes are never just boxes. She was quiet for a moment.
Then my father wasn’t easy to grieve. We were close in the way of people who are too alike and too stubborn to say it easily. When he got sick, we had 6 months of knowing it was coming, and we still spent most of that time arguing about the company. She looked at her hands. I keep thinking there was a conversation we were supposed to have that we never got to.
Ethan put the spoon down and turned to look at her. What would you have said? She thought about it for a long time, long enough that he thought she wasn’t going to answer. That I was proud to be his daughter, she said finally, even when he was impossible. In the living room, Lily was on the floor with a book, talking softly to a stuffed elephant she’d named Gerald, which nobody in the house mentioned was also the name of Victoria’s lawyer.
