Chapter 498: Not Your Call to Make

The phone rang before nine that morning, and Arianne knew from the ring alone it was Lucas. He never called this early unless the day was about to reshape itself around whatever he had to say next. Twenty-six days into the vigil, and she’d learned to read that particular ring the way she used to read boardroom silences.

"Edmund Cole’s attorney reached out to my office late yesterday," he said, no preamble, the way he delivered anything he expected her to need sitting down for. "He’s asked to see you before the arraignment. Same arrangement as before, a supervised room, a guard outside the door. I asked his attorney why he wants you specifically, since nothing in any file I’ve seen connects the two of you. She wouldn’t answer that, and I don’t think it’s because she doesn’t know. I told them I’d pass along the request and nothing more. Whether you go is entirely yours to decide."

"When?"

"Whenever you’re ready. He didn’t attach a deadline to it." Lucas’s voice stayed level, procedural, a man reading facts off a page rather than offering an opinion on them. "I can have the paperwork cleared by this afternoon if you want it done quickly."

"Do it." Arianne ended the call before he could ask the question she could already hear forming, the same one every version of this conversation eventually reached, and set the phone down on the family suite table hard enough that Gilbert looked up from the folder he’d been reading across from her.

"Who was that?"

"Lucas. Edmund wants to see me." She said it plainly, watching whatever had been easy in Gilbert’s face fold into something else entirely. "Before the arraignment."

"No."

"That’s not your call to make."

"Then call it a fact instead of an opinion." Gilbert set the folder down, his voice dropping into the register he used for things he wasn’t going to negotiate on. "That man orchestrated the sabotage that put Franz in that room down the hall. He’s the reason Alex is dead, whether a court ever proves it or not. You are not walking into a room with him."

"I sat across from Dominic and walked out fine."

"Dominic had a reason to want to see you. Seven years of one, whatever it turned into after." Gilbert’s jaw worked once before he continued. "You’ve never met Edmund. Never sat across a table from him, never had your name attached to anything he touched before Nate found the account numbers. I don’t understand why a man who’s spent years staying three steps ahead of everyone looking for him suddenly wants to spend one of his last free hours in a room with a woman he has no reason to know."

"I don’t understand it either." Arianne kept her eyes on him, steady, refusing to let the argument tip into the kind of fight neither of them would win by raising their voice. "That’s exactly why I’m going. I want to know what he thinks he still gets out of asking, and I’m not going to spend the rest of this pregnancy wondering about it from a hospital chair."

Something in Gilbert’s expression cracked at that, just enough to show the fear underneath the anger. "That’s the part I can’t get past. You’re not just risking yourself walking in there."

"I know exactly what I’m risking. I think about it every morning before I’ve even gotten out of bed." She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers, the gesture doing more of the talking than anything she could have said next. "I’m not asking you to be fine with this. I’m asking you to help me do it safely instead of trying to talk me out of something you already know I’m going to do anyway."

Gilbert didn’t answer right away, and the silence stretched long enough that Arianne let it, the way she’d learned to let his silences run their course instead of filling them for him.

"Fine." He said it like the word cost him something physical to produce. "But I’m not waiting in a lobby this time. Whatever this is, I’m in that room with you, and if he so much as raises his voice, we’re done and we’re leaving."

"I’m not going to argue you out of that."

"Good, because I wasn’t offering it as a negotiation." A little of the tension left his shoulders, replaced by something closer to resolve. "I’ll call the detention center myself and confirm the room can hold two visitors instead of one. Lucas can handle the paperwork. I handle the part where nothing happens to you in that building that I’m not standing close enough to stop."

"Thank you." Arianne meant it more plainly than she usually let herself mean anything out loud these days. "For not making me choose between going and having you there."

"You were never going to have to choose that. I just needed a minute to get to the part where I say yes." Gilbert managed something close to a smile, thin but real. "You should tell Uncle Vincent and Auntie Amanda where you’re going before you go, the same as last time. And Aunt Estella, so she has the twins covered without wondering why you canceled the afternoon."

"Already planned on it. I’ll drive with you straight from the twins’ pickup so nobody’s left waiting on either end." She pulled the chair back out and sat again, the restlessness in her settling now that there was a plan attached to it instead of just a decision. "What does ’in the room’ actually look like? I don’t want him reading anything into where you’re standing, and I don’t want to spend the whole visit watching you instead of him."

"I’ll take the chair by the door, not the table. Close enough to move if I need to, far enough that it reads as my choice, not a leash on you." Gilbert had already thought it through before she asked, the answer coming too fast to be improvised. "If I need you to stop talking, I’ll say your name once, plainly, nothing dramatic about it. You don’t have to explain yourself to him beyond whatever you actually want to say."

"And if he says something about Alex?"

"Then we’ll deal with it exactly the way we’ve dealt with everything else this month. Together, and not gracefully, and it’ll still be enough." Gilbert reached over and closed the folder the rest of the way, done pretending it had his attention. "Anything useful in there, or was I just giving my hands something to do while you were on the phone?"

"Both. Nate sent over the last of the financial records this morning, everything cross-referenced and closed out for the prosecutors." Gilbert closed the folder, setting his palm flat on top of it. "It’s finished, as much as any of it gets to be finished before a jury weighs in. Edmund doesn’t have anywhere left to hide the money. Whatever he wants from you in that room, it isn’t leverage. He doesn’t have any left."

"Then I want to know what he thinks he still has." Arianne stood, restless in the way she’d been most mornings lately, half a need to move and half a need to outrun the thought sitting under it. "People like him don’t ask for a meeting with nothing to offer. He’s planning to say something he thinks will land, and I’d rather hear it on my own terms than let him save it for a courtroom where I don’t get to answer back."

Vincent and Amanda arrived with the twins an hour later, and Arianne told them where she was going the moment the children were settled with Aunt Estella’s phone call already routed through for the afternoon’s activities. Amanda’s face went through the same sequence Gilbert’s had, worry chased fast by something that looked almost like pride once she understood Gilbert would be in the room. Vincent said less, but he held her a beat longer than usual before letting her go, and neither of them tried to talk her out of it.

Lily found her by the window a few minutes later, Petal tucked under one arm, and studied her the way she’d started studying every adult in the family since the accident, quick eyes checking for whatever might be wrong before anyone said it out loud. "Are you going somewhere scary?"

"A little bit." Arianne crouched to her height, choosing the truth in the smallest size that fit. "Uncle Gilbert’s coming with me, so I won’t be by myself."

"Good." Lily considered that, apparently satisfied, and held Petal out for a moment before pulling the dinosaur back against her own chest. "You can borrow her if you need to be brave. But I want her back after."

"Deal." Arianne kissed the top of her head and let her run back to Leo, who’d already claimed the good chair by the window, and stood again feeling steadier for it than she had any right to after a conversation with a seven-year-old about borrowed courage.

Arianne didn’t let herself think too hard about the date Lucas would eventually confirm before she reached Franz’s room, sitting down in the chair that had claimed her for nearly four weeks of mornings and evenings she’d stopped counting individually.

"Edmund Cole wants to see me," she told him, her fingers finding his without any conscious effort to locate them. "Gilbert’s coming with me this time. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and for once I didn’t try very hard to give him one." She rested her forehead against their joined hands for a moment before she kept going. "I don’t know what he wants yet. I know I’m not going to let him have whatever it is. I just wanted you to hear it from me before anyone else mentions it near this room, in case some part of you is still listening for my voice over anyone else’s."

The monitor traced its same steady line, indifferent to what she’d just told him, and Arianne stayed until the last of the daylight had gone from the window, telling herself that whatever waited for her in that visitation room, she’d already survived worse in this same building without either of them breaking.