Chapter 496: What’s Left

Blackwood Corp lasted four days past the arrests before the board voted to dissolve rather than ride out the exposure, and Gio brought her the news the same way he brought her everything now, laid flat on the tablet without any spin attached to it.

"They’re calling it an orderly wind-down for the press release. It isn’t orderly." He set the tablet on the family suite table, the stock ticker frozen mid-collapse on the screen. "What’s left gets auctioned off in pieces over the next few months. Half of it already has buyers circling."

"And Dominic?"

"Denied bail this morning. Flight risk, given how much of his money was already offshore before anyone came looking for it." Gio watched her for a reaction she didn’t give him. "There’s one more thing. His attorney reached out to Lucas’s office yesterday. Dominic’s asking to see you, before the arraignment."

"Asking me for what, exactly?"

"He didn’t say. Lucas didn’t ask him to explain himself, and neither did I." Gio set the tablet down. "You don’t have to grant him anything."

"I know I don’t." Arianne closed the tablet herself. "I’m going to see him anyway. He didn’t earn it. I’d rather know exactly what he thinks he still has to say to me than spend the rest of my life wondering."

"That’s your call to make, not mine." Gio picked the tablet back up, the stock ticker still frozen on the screen behind him. "I just wanted to know if you needed anything handled while you were gone. Franz’s doctors, the twins, Lexx, the reporters camped outside the gate. Anything."

"Keep doing what you’re already doing. That’s enough. And tell Vincent and Amanda where I’ve gone before I leave, not after. I don’t want either of them hearing it secondhand."

Vincent had offered the car without being asked, and Aunt Estella took Lexx along with the twins for the afternoon without needing to be asked at all. Gilbert drove her himself rather than send anyone else, though he didn’t come further than the waiting room once they arrived, choosing a chair across from the vending machines and telling her he’d be exactly there when she was done. Lucas had arranged the room instead of a booth and a phone line, a small mercy she hadn’t asked him for either — a table, two chairs, a guard outside the door instead of glass between them.

Dominic looked smaller than she remembered him, which surprised her more than it should have. Seven years of watching him take up an entire room without trying, back before the banquet that ended it, had trained her to expect that same presence even now, and what she got instead was a man in a gray jumpsuit with his wrists free and nothing left in his hands to hold.

"You came." He said it like he’d been rehearsing several versions of that sentence and settled on the shortest one. "I wasn’t sure you would."

"I almost didn’t." Arianne sat across from him, no urge in her to close the distance any further than the table required. "You asked. I spent two days deciding whether you’d earned even that much of my time."

"Have I?"

"No." Something flickered across his face at that, gone before she let herself name it. "I came anyway, because I’d rather see for myself what’s left of you than spend the rest of my life wondering what you thought this was worth asking for."

Dominic looked down at his own hands for a moment, and when he looked back up, whatever performance he’d walked in with had thinned out into something closer to plain exhaustion. "I keep waiting to feel like this is the worst part. The company, the charges, all of it. It isn’t. The worst part is Nicholas asking Diana why Daddy isn’t coming to his game this weekend, and neither of us having an answer that doesn’t make it worse."

"You don’t get to hand me that and expect it to land as grief I’m supposed to share."

"I’m not asking you to share it."

"Then what are you asking me for?" Arianne kept her voice level, the question genuine rather than rhetorical, because she actually wanted to hear him try to answer it. "You asked for this meeting. So tell me what you thought it would give you, because I don’t think either of us walks out with what you’re hoping for."

Dominic didn’t answer that right away, and the silence went on long enough that Arianne let it, unwilling to fill it for him the way she once might have.

"I thought I wanted you to understand it wasn’t always about hurting you," he said finally. "That some of it was just about surviving my own family, my own name, and you were standing in the way of that before you were ever the target of it."

"Don’t." Arianne kept her hands flat on the table, refusing to let them curl into anything he could read as anger. "Diana already told me the truth herself, months ago, because she couldn’t carry it alone anymore. The affair ran almost a year before the banquet. She was already pregnant with Nicholas when you stood up in front of both our families and made your choice. Whatever you told yourself that night about surviving your family, the real reason was smaller than that. You picked the woman who could give you the child I’d told you I wasn’t ready for yet, and you’ve spent every year since dressing it up as something nobler."

Whatever he’d rehearsed for this meeting hadn’t included that answer coming back at him whole. "She told you that?"

"Months ago. In a school parking lot, because she couldn’t carry it by herself either." Arianne watched him absorb it, no satisfaction in her at watching it land, only the plain fact of finally saying it to his face instead of hers alone. "So don’t hand me the noble version. I’ve had the real one long enough that it costs me nothing to say it out loud now."

"I’ve known you chose yourself over me since the night it happened. That part was never the mystery." She folded her hands on the table, keeping them from shaking. "It took three more years and an investigation neither of us asked for to learn you’d let yourself become someone else’s weapon in the process too. What I never understood, and still don’t, is how a man survives losing everything he actually loved chasing something he never needed in the first place. You didn’t need Summers Corporation. You didn’t need to hurt me to keep Blackwood Corp standing. You had Diana. You had Nicholas. You had a version of yourself that could have stayed decent enough to keep both of those things, and you spent it anyway, on me, on revenge, on people who were never going to give you back what you thought they owed you."

"You think I don’t know that now?"

"The divorce was final before any of this, wasn’t it?"

The question landed somewhere he hadn’t braced for. "Months before."

"So she’d already decided you weren’t worth staying for, and none of this changed her mind, it just confirmed it." Arianne let that sit a moment. "I’m not saying it to be cruel. I’m saying it because you keep talking about what you lost like it was taken from you. Most of it, you handed away yourself, one decision at a time, long before anyone came looking for the evidence."

"I know that too."

"I think you’re only sorry because it finally cost you something you couldn’t afford to lose." Arianne held his gaze, no anger left in it that she needed him to see, only the plain fact of it. "That’s not the same as being sorry for what you did. I stopped needing you to be sorry a long time before I walked into this room today."

"Then why did you come?"

"Because I wanted to see for myself that it was actually over, and I didn’t trust a headline to tell me that the way I’d trust my own eyes." She stood, the chair scraping once against the floor, the sound of it louder than she’d meant it to be. "You don’t get absolution from me. You were never going to get it, and I didn’t come here carrying any to hand over even if I’d changed my mind on the drive."

"What do I get, then?"

"The truth, which is more than you gave me for most of the years I’ve known you." Arianne looked at him a moment longer, memorizing nothing, needing nothing further from the shape of his face. "Blackwood Corp is gone. Diana’s already gone. Whatever version of you might have kept either of those things is gone too, and none of that is mine to grieve on your behalf. I hope Nicholas gets an answer someday that doesn’t make it worse. I hope you’re the one who finds it for him. That’s the only thing I came here still wanting for you."

She didn’t wait for him to answer that either, and the guard let her out before Dominic had found whatever he might have said to the empty chair across from him.

Gilbert stood the second she came through the waiting room door, no questions in his face, just the offer of his arm if she needed it. She didn’t take it, but she let him fall into step beside her anyway, out through the doors and into air that tasted cleaner than anything inside that building had.

"Well?" he asked, once they were in the car.

"It’s over." Arianne watched the detention center shrink in the side mirror, smaller with every block between them. "Not the case. Not whatever comes next for Dominic. Just the part of it that was ever mine to carry."

"How does that feel?"

She weighed the real answer before she gave it, unwilling to hand him less than the truth just because it was easier to say. "Lighter than I expected, and sadder than I wanted it to be. Both at once. I don’t think I get to pick just one."

"You don’t have to pick. Not with me." Gilbert kept his eyes on the road, giving her the privacy of not being watched while she worked through it. "You’re allowed both, same as always."

The car pulled back onto the road toward the hospital, past the last of the reporters still working the story from the sidewalk outside the detention center, and Arianne let herself rest her head against the window for the length of two stoplights, eyes closed, not asleep, just letting herself go slack in a way she hadn’t allowed herself since the accident. By the time they reached the private wing, she was steady enough to walk in on her own, toward the one person waiting for her whose absolution she’d never once had to ask for twice.