60 #2
Not too close.
Close enough.
"She does not get to define why I stand beside you," he said.
Dorothy looked at him.
His voice was low, meant only for her, though Victor and Hale could hear if they chose. "Not then. Not now."
The knot in her chest loosened enough to hurt.
Before she could answer, Hale's phone rang.
He looked at the screen. "Marcus."
Victor's expression sharpened. "Speaker."
Hale answered. "Yes."
Marcus's voice came through clipped and tense. "Mr. Hale, Mr. Raymond is asking whether Miss Perry will agree to a brief call or meeting. He has received the forged contract."
Dorothy closed her eyes for half a second.
There it was.
The old door again.
Victor's voice was ice. "He may issue his statement through counsel."
Marcus paused, then said carefully, "He does not intend to make a public statement before speaking to Miss Perry."
Sebastian's expression changed.
Dorothy opened her eyes.
Hale's gaze moved to her. "You do not have to agree."
Of course she did not.
She had been told that all week. You do not have to see him. You do not have to answer. You do not have to defend yourself. Each statement was true, and each left untouched the part of her that remembered how many times she once had to prove pain before anyone called it real.
"What does he want?" she asked.
Marcus answered directly. "He says he wants to ask her one question privately before he chooses his response publicly."
Dorothy felt Sebastian go still beside her.
Victor's cane struck the floor. "Absolutely not."
Dorothy looked at her grandfather. "Grandfather."
"No. I allowed the pavilion because he claimed he would learn to leave. Now every crisis drags him back to your door."
That was true.
It was also not the whole truth.
Dorothy turned toward Sebastian.
His face had become unreadable again, and this time the distance was not coldness but injury preparing itself in advance.
"You think I should not speak to him," she said.
Sebastian held her gaze. "I think you already know what he wants to ask."
She did.
That was the problem.
Trevor would not ask whether the contract was real. Not if he had learned anything. He would ask something that made belief sound like a choice she could guide. He would place, perhaps without meaning to, the burden of his right decision back into her hands.
And still, Dorothy wanted to hear whether he would do that.
Because once, for years, she had begged without words for Trevor to choose belief before evidence, before scandal, before another woman's tears made her into the villain.
She had begged with quiet dinners, with swallowed humiliation, with love laid carefully before a man who did not know how to read it.
Vanessa knew that. Somehow, Vanessa knew exactly that.
The fake contract had not only been designed for Trevor to believe.
It had been designed for Dorothy to watch him choose.
"I will speak to him," Dorothy said.
Victor's face hardened.
Sebastian looked away.
That hurt more than Victor's anger.
Dorothy's voice softened, though she did not apologize. "Not alone."
Hale nodded. "Controlled call. Recorded. Present counsel."
Marcus answered at once. "Acceptable."
"No," Dorothy said.
Everyone looked at her.
She took the phone from Hale. "Not a call. The south terrace. Ten minutes. He comes alone. Everyone else waits where they can see us."
Victor looked ready to explode.
Sebastian remained silent.
Marcus said, "Understood."
The line ended.
For a moment, the room held only the sound of Dorothy's breathing.
Then Sebastian said, "Do you want him to believe you?"
Dorothy turned toward him.
The question was not jealous.
That made it harder.
"Yes," she said.
His face tightened.
"But not because I explain myself," she added.
Something in him shifted. Not healed. Not soothed. But listening.
"I want to know," Dorothy said, each word slower now, "whether he can choose truth without making me guide him to it."
Sebastian looked at her for a long moment.
Then he nodded once.
It cost him.
She saw that.
"I hope he does," he said.
And because Sebastian was honest even when honesty cut him, he added, "I hate that I do."
The south terrace overlooked the lower gardens, where bare trees stood in disciplined rows beneath the late winter sky.
It was colder than the pavilion had been that morning.
The air had sharpened as evening approached, and Dorothy stepped outside without a coat because the cold helped hold her together.
From the library windows, Victor watched with Hale beside him.
Sebastian stood farther back near the terrace doors, close enough to see, too far to hear unless voices rose.
Dorothy felt his presence behind her like a second heartbeat she had not yet learned how to answer.
Trevor arrived alone.
He wore the same dark overcoat from the pavilion, but something in him looked more worn now, as if each crisis removed another layer of the man he had once used to face the world.
He stopped at the distance Hale had marked.
No closer. He looked at Dorothy not with suspicion, not with demand, but with a kind of grief that had learned to stand without asking to be held.
"You saw it," she said.
"Yes."
"Do you believe it?"
He did not answer immediately.
The pause struck her before the words could.
A small, ancient part of her recoiled.
Of course. Of course there would be a pause. Of course even now, after everything, the world would ask her to stand before a man she had loved and wait to see whether Vanessa's lie had entered him first.
Trevor saw the reaction.
Pain crossed his face.
"No," he said. "I do not believe it."
The answer came too late to erase the pause, but it came with enough force that Dorothy stilled.
"Then why ask to see me?"
"Because I received the document from Vanessa's counsel with a demand that I acknowledge you manipulated me," he said.
"My legal team is ready to reject it as forged. Marcus has already found errors in the signature source. Elise is tracing the metadata. I can issue a denial without speaking to you."
"Then do it."
"I will."
"Then why are you here?"
He looked down briefly, then back at her. "Because if I issue a statement, it will carry my interpretation of your actions. I do not want to speak over you, even in defense."
Dorothy stared at him.
The answer was almost right.
So close to right that it hurt.