4. June #2
Her voice cracks with insecurity. A war I can’t begin to understand (but probably should begin to, considering my own marital issues) plays behind her eyes.
Likely reliving all those moments with Richard over the years.
All the evidence compiled to prove his wrongs, yet we had to watch Mom choose him over and over again.
“No, you’re right,” I reassure her. “You’re not.”
Because she won’t take Mark back, not when we’ve all been on the other side of it.
“I’m sorry for… well, the interrogation. Old habits,” she shuffles to her feet, a valiant excuse to end the conversation. “We should get some sleep. Mark will be by to run through the case tomorrow, and you still smell like holding cell.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I’m glad you made bail.”
“I’m… thank you for going through all that to get me a lawyer.”
She nods as we both make our way to our respective rooms. Both of us content to sleep until forced awake by the demands of the day.
“June?” Meredith murmurs, hesitating by her door.
“Mm?”
“I… Well, I love you.”
I pause to look back at her. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she doesn’t wait for me to reply—just moves back into her room and closes the door behind.
I swallow. “Night, Mere.”
By the time Mark arrives, I’ve slept for almost twenty hours, showered twice, and managed to stomach at least three slices of toast. Meredith, valiantly, attempts to cook something more substantial on the kitchenette (but I’m fairly certain the hotel only installed it for show).
In actuality, the ‘room’ is far closer to a suite, with two bedrooms, two en-suites, a shared communal area with a corner dedicated to the kitchen space.
So far, only the fridge and the microwave have been used much.
Knowing that we could be here for months seems to have lit something under Meredith, who mutters about spitefully raking up Mark’s bill by ordering room service as she nurses a pan of lukewarm pasta.
The man himself sits in the armchair opposite me, perfectly at ease within our tentative attempts at domesticity.
If I had to guess, by the way he beelined for the living area on arrival, he’s been here before.
Not entirely surprising. But with Meredith’s ‘working theory’ fresh in my mind, I can’t help but notice the way his eyes stray over to the kitchen every now and then.
“So,” I say, effectively snapping his wondering gaze back to me. “Do you have anything actually useful to share with me today?”
He props an ankle over his knee. “I think my advice has been plenty helpful, or have you not noticed that you’re no longer being detained in a holding cell?”
My returning smile is childishly spiteful. “Then by all means, continue.”
“Alright,” he pulls out a hefty-looking binder.
“Here’s where we stand. The federal government has formally charged you with aiding and abetting in the distribution and sale of counterfeit merchandise.
They’re also circling conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
That one’s their favorite catch-all for anything involving money and communication across borders. ”
“I didn’t?—”
Mark holds up a hand. “I don’t care. Let me tell you what they think before you spend the next three hours defending your honor.”
“Just get to the point, Mark. Don’t be patronizing,” Meredith seems to have materialized at my side, abandoning her cooking attempts in favor of joining me on the couch.
Mark’s eyes linger on his (ex) wife a beat too long before he takes several documents from his folder and hands them to us.
“They have emails between you and Ashton. Requests for specific pieces, namely a couple of Degas’ and a Renoir…
traditional landscapes, all of them. In some of these emails, you talk about matching brushwork and color exactly.
The descriptions here resemble the pieces the feds picked up from your gallery and the ‘forgery’ they have courtesy of the whistleblower. ”
“That wasn’t a forgery, it was a pastiche,” I cut in. “It was commissioned as a pastiche.”
“Well, to a jury, these emails read like you were conspiring to produce one-to-one replicas for him to sell.”
I look to Meredith for support. “It wasn’t a replica. The sea was magenta.”
“They’ll still argue that they’re too similar to be coincidental,” Mark says evenly. “They look enough like the originals that the prosecution can call them counterfeits mid-process.”
Meredith glances up from the printed email she’s clutching. “Intent is everything, though, right? You can argue that a pastiche isn’t a forgery if it’s never represented as the original.”
“Correct,” Mark says, ticking something on his pad. “And we will argue that. But juries can be swayed by visuals, and those canvases are persuasive on a surface level.”
I sink lower in my seat. “What else?”
Another couple of documents are unclipped from his binder. “There’s an invoice in your name with your signature. Dated around the sale of the first Degas forgery that looks very much like a sale contract to a private collector.”
“How much?” Meredith asks.
“Three hundred thousand,” Mark reels off without checking. “That, on top of the bank transfers from Ashton’s account to yours, means you’re sitting on a nice little nest egg of just under half a million.”
I stare at him. “I think I would have noticed if I had half a million suddenly weighing down my pockets.”
“Cute, but that won’t hold up in court,” Mark continues. “The wires from Ashton could easily be argued as down payments for the unfinished paintings they found at the gallery, so we’re going to have to be a bit better than ‘I didn’t notice’, yeah?”
“Mark,” Meredith's voice snaps like a warning.
“Finally,” Mark goes on, “there’s a witness.”
I gape at him. “To what?! I didn’t–”
“An art restorer here in the city is ready to swear under oath they finished one of your paintings before it went to the collector as an authentic Degas. I don’t know yet how credible they are, but their statement is in the file.”
Meredith tilts her head. “All of this is circumstantial.”
“Yes, but layered circumstantial evidence can be enough for a conviction if the jury buys it.” Mark’s tone softens slightly.
“You think the whistleblower is the collector?”
“And incriminate themselves in this? No.”
“If they’re out three hundred kay, that’s a motive,” Meredith argues.
I find myself snorting. “The first time I met Ashton, he dropped that much on a Pearson-Lord without even blinking. These people have more money than sense.”
“If he’s framing you, your husband has at least a little,” Mark counters. “You’re the only Parker in custody. That makes you convenient to prosecute.”
“But all of this implicates him as much as it does me. Someone could be framing us both.”
The beat of heavy silence tells me all I need to know about Mark and Meredith’s thoughts on that particular theory.
Mark breaks it by barreling forward. “As it stands, the government believes you’re complicit, dead to rights.
Which means we stick to the truth, we don’t give them an inch, and shine a torch on the fissures of their evidence.
No flourishes, no trying to make you look saintly.
Just the facts that put distance between you and those forgeries. ”
“Pastiches.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
It’s almost funny how quickly my brain starts flicking through possibilities like some grim little slide projector. Now that it’s all laid out. Now that I know all the ways someone… Ashton… could have screwed me over.
Could Ashton have done this to me? The man who pursued me relentlessly with coffee and humility and honesty. The man who kissed my forehead and held me close when it felt like everything was falling apart. The man who danced with me at my mother’s birthday to distract me from all my insecurities.
But then again… Could the man who proposed on a whim after six weeks, married me while we were both still tipsy without telling my sisters, also be the kind of man who forged my signature and used my paintings to line his own pockets?
The question lodges in my throat like a fish bone.
“—which is exactly why we should be pushing to have Ashton arrested the minute he surfaces,” Meredith is saying. “The longer he’s out there, the more control he has over the narrative. We make him the focus, we take the heat off June.”
“That’s a nice theory,” Mark replies with that frustrating little smile on his face.
Like he’s enjoying this. “But the government doesn’t care about narrative.
They care about what they can prove. We don’t get her out of this by pointing at her missing husband.
We get her out by dismantling every piece of evidence that links her to the alleged sales. ”
“It’s not just about dismantling,” Meredith shoots back. “It’s about context. If the jury understands that Ashton orchestrated this?—”
“If we can prove Ashton orchestrated this, we’ll use it. But right now, all we have is an empty chair at the defendant’s table with his name on it. That doesn’t help June. It makes her look abandoned and complicit.”
Abandoned and complicit.
The words sting because they fit too well.
My fingers bite into the flesh of my palms as I try to picture Ashton out there somewhere doing something noble that would explain all of this. The image refuses to materialize.
All I can see is a man walking away from me at a party, promising he’d be back before I missed him, and leaving me with enough rope to hang myself.