Chapter 500: Everything His Cowardice Cost

Gilbert didn’t waste the opening. "Alex and Layla. The accident that killed them. I want to know exactly how much of it was yours."

"None of it, if you’re asking whether I was there myself." Edmund’s tone didn’t change, easy in a way that made the words land harder. "I’ve never needed to be present for the outcomes I arrange. That’s what staff is for."

"That’s not a denial."

"No." Something in Edmund’s face settled, a man finally reaching the part of the conversation he’d been waiting for. "It’s a fact you’re welcome to sit with however you like. I didn’t touch either of them. I also didn’t lift a finger to stop what was coming for them, once I understood what your brother-in-law had found."

"What did he find?" Arianne kept her voice even, though the question cost her more than the last several had combined.

"Enough to worry me, for the first time in a long while." Edmund folded his hands on the table, unhurried, savoring the shape of the memory. "Alex Rochefort was three names away from mine when he died. Three. I’d spent over a decade making sure no one got past the first one. He got to the third in under a year, working from a study in his own house with nothing but a notebook and a grudge on your behalf. I respected that, actually, right up until it stopped being useful to me."

Gilbert’s hands closed into fists on the arms of his chair, and he didn’t try to hide it. "So you let it happen."

"I let a great many things happen. That one, I’ll admit, I enjoyed a little more than the others." Edmund turned his attention back to Arianne, and whatever warmth had crept into his voice for Gilbert disappeared entirely. "Years ago, I made sure the right person heard that Alex’s death traced back to Rochefort Group pressure. Your company. Your decisions, your deadlines, your name on the paperwork that put him wherever he needed to be that week. I planted that story myself, Arianne, and I’ve spent every year since wondering whether you ever let yourself believe it."

For a moment neither Gilbert nor the guard outside the door existed at all, only the sound of her own name in his mouth again. She had believed it. Not every day, not out loud to anyone, but often enough in the years since the funeral that the doubt had worn a groove into her the way water wears stone, patient and never quite finished.

"You watched me carry that." She said it flatly, testing the shape of the anger before she let it show. "For years."

"I did more than watch." Something almost like delight crossed his face. "I made sure the story had somewhere to land."

"And Layla?" Arianne kept her voice from shaking, though it cost her more than she wanted him to see. "She never investigated anything in her life. She kept a garden and drove the twins’ old carpool before either of them was even born. What did she do to earn a place in whatever you’re calling this?"

"Nothing at all." Edmund said it without hesitation, and the ease of the admission landed harder than any justification would have. "She was in the car. That was the whole of it."

"That’s enough." Gilbert was on his feet before the sentence finished, and it took Arianne’s hand flat against his arm to keep him from crossing the space between the chairs.

"It’s not enough. Not nearly." Arianne stood too, slower than Gilbert had, every inch of it a choice rather than a reflex. "But I’m not interested in the rest of what you think you’re owed to say about it."

Edmund tilted his head, unbothered by her standing over him. "You’re angry."

"I’m not angry at what you think I am." She held his gaze across the table, the last of her patience for his version of the story finally spent. "You want this to be about my brother, my husband, my company. None of us were ever the real target. A sister you couldn’t save and a man who never once paid for it while he was alive to answer for it — that’s where this actually started."

Something behind Edmund’s eyes closed the way it had the last time she’d gotten too close to a truth he hadn’t offered up himself. ℴ

"Gabriel Summers is dead. He’s been dead for years, and every plan you built after that stopped being about Arianna Brennan and started being about me, because I was the only piece of him left standing where you could still reach it." Arianne kept her hands flat and steady on the table. "Gabriel is the one who abandoned your sister. He’s the one who chose his own name over her and let her jump rather than face what he’d done. I was just the name he gave his own daughter to hurt my mother, and you’ve spent nearly my whole life punishing me for a cruelty that was entirely his."

"You don’t know what he was to her."

"I know he never answered for any of it, and you decided I would answer in his place because it was easier than admitting the only person who actually owed your sister anything was already beyond your reach." Arianne didn’t look away. "Grief doesn’t come with a decades-long plan attached to it. Whatever you’ve actually been running since before I could walk, calling it grief doesn’t make it true."

Edmund said nothing for a long moment, and the silence sat differently on him than it had all morning, less performance in it now than she’d seen since she’d sat down.

"You’ll spend whatever years the court gives you listening for news of my life through whatever’s left of your network, because I know you’ll want to." Arianne stepped back from the table, done with the room and everything in it. "I hope it costs you every time. My husband is going to wake up. My family is going to keep growing whether you like the shape of it or not. Everything you spent your life deciding I didn’t deserve, I’m going to have anyway, and you’ll have spent yours making sure you never got any of it for yourself."

She didn’t wait for him to answer, and Gilbert didn’t either, one hand at the small of her back as the guard opened the door before either of them had to ask.

Neither of them spoke again until they were back in the car, and Arianne let her head rest against the window for the length of the first two turns, watching the detention center shrink behind them the same way it had after Dominic, smaller this time, though she couldn’t have said if that was the distance or something in herself that had finally stopped needing to look back at it.

"You didn’t have to say any of that in there." Gilbert kept his eyes on the road, giving her the privacy of not being watched while she found her way back to herself. "You could have let me ask the rest of it."

"I know." She pressed her palm flat against her stomach without deciding to, a habit she’d had since the night she first found out. "I’ve been carrying that story about Alex for years without letting anyone see me carrying it. I wasn’t going to walk out of that room still holding it."

"How does it feel, put down?"

She considered the question before she answered it. "Lighter than I expected. Angrier than I thought I had left in me."

Gilbert didn’t answer that, because there wasn’t one that would have helped, and the car carried them back toward the private wing in a silence that felt, for the first time in weeks, like it belonged to something finished instead of something still waiting to happen.

Franz’s room was exactly where she’d left it that morning, twenty-eight days unchanged except for her, and Arianne lowered herself into the chair like the day had finally caught up to her body all at once.

"I said something today I’ve been afraid to say out loud for years." She took his hand, needing the weight of it more than she wanted to admit out loud. "I told a man who spent his whole life planning my ruin that I refuse to let him have it. I meant it more than I’ve meant almost anything I’ve said in this room." She rested her cheek against his knuckles instead of speaking for a moment, letting the silence say the rest of it. "Your parents know about the baby. Gilbert knows everything, same as always. Edmund and Dominic are both exactly where they belong. Everyone who ever tried to convince me I didn’t deserve what I have is either behind bars or out of chances to try again. All that’s left now is you waking up to see what I built anyway."

The monitor kept counting out its same patient rhythm, indifferent to how much had actually changed that day, and Arianne stayed until the last of the daylight left the window, believing for the first time in twenty-eight days that the waiting might actually be close to over.