CHAPTER 10
The Codicil
He called Desmond again the morning after Simone's call, this time with a name instead of a question.
“Margaret Doyle,” Marcus said, without preamble, borrowing the habit from his mother without quite meaning to.
“I know part of it now. I know my mother paid to move her out of state and made sure she understood not to come back.
I need to find her. Not to cause trouble.
I need to know if she's willing to tell me the rest of it herself.”
Desmond was quiet long enough that Marcus wondered if he'd hung up.
“She went by Margaret Foster, last I heard, married a professor somewhere out west, Oregon I think, maybe twenty years ago.
I only know that much because your father mentioned it once, guilty about it in the specific way men of his generation got guilty about things they'd never actually done anything to fix.” A pause, heavier this time.
“Your mother doesn't know I know that much.
I'd like to keep it that way, if it's all the same to you.”
“I need more than a state and a maybe.”
“Then you're going to need someone better at finding people than I am,” Desmond said. “I'd start with Walter. Your grandfather's old attorney kept files on everything, and unlike your mother, Walter's never been particularly loyal to anyone he didn't personally like.”
? ? ?
Walter Higgins had retired from active practice a decade ago but still kept an office two floors above the firm that had replaced him, a courtesy his former partners extended, Marcus suspected, mostly because nobody had the nerve to ask an eighty one year old man who'd known three generations of Kingsleys to actually leave.
“I wondered how long it would take one of you to ask me about Margaret,” Walter said, not looking up from the crossword he'd been working when Marcus let himself in.
“Your grandfather made me draft the settlement personally.
Wouldn't trust it to anyone else in the firm.
I've had her last known address in a drawer for thirty years, on the theory that someday somebody in this family would finally have the decency to check on her instead of just paying to make her disappear.”
“Will you give it to me.”
“I'll do better than that.” Walter set down his pen, and for the first time since Marcus had walked in, looked directly at him with the particular sharpness that had apparently made him formidable in a courtroom decades before Marcus was born.
“I'll tell you what the settlement said, because I don't imagine your mother's shown you that part.
Standard nondisclosure language, dressed up as protecting the family's privacy.
But underneath it, in language your grandfather insisted on personally, an open ended offer of support if Margaret ever needed it, medical, financial, anything at all, no questions asked, no expiration date.
Your grandfather felt guilty enough about what his own family had done to write himself an escape hatch.
Whether your mother's ever honored it is a different question entirely.”
Marcus took the address Walter finally slid across the desk, a small town outside Portland, and felt, folding it into his jacket pocket alongside the space where the ring still lived, the specific vertigo of understanding that his family's cruelty and his family's conscience had apparently been fighting the same quiet war for thirty five years, and his mother had simply been winning it longer than anyone else had been willing to notice.
? ? ?
He had exactly four days before the London leg of the roadshow, and he spent the better part of that afternoon in a board call he could not afford to skip, seven faces on a video screen asking careful, polite questions about family stability that were really, underneath the politeness, asking whether the Kingsley name was still worth the premium investors had been paying for it for a century.
“We're comfortable with the trajectory,” said Harold Pierce, the board member Marcus trusted least and needed most, given his seat on the audit committee that would ultimately decide whether the codicil got invoked at all.
“Provided the personal situation doesn't generate further headlines before the roadshow closes. I trust that's being managed.”
“It's being handled honestly,” Marcus said, “which is a different thing than managed, and I'd ask the board to consider that difference before this call goes any further.”
A pause, the kind that told him the room hadn't expected him to push back.
“Duly noted,” Harold said, in the tone of a man filing something away for later rather than actually hearing it, and the call moved on to numbers Marcus answered from memory while the address in his jacket pocket sat there the whole time, a small, folded weight he was increasingly certain mattered more than anything currently on the agenda.
? ? ?
He didn't call the number Walter had found, an old one, probably disconnected after thirty years.
He wrote a letter instead, the old fashioned kind, sitting at his desk after the board call ended, because it seemed like the only form of outreach that couldn't be spun, edited, or explained away by anyone standing between him and the truth.
He kept it short. He introduced himself.
He explained, as plainly as he could, that he'd recently learned some of what his family had done to her, that he suspected his mother was in the process of doing something similar to his own marriage, and that he would be enormously grateful for anything Margaret was willing to tell him, on her own terms, at whatever pace felt safe to her.
He sealed it, addressed it to Margaret Foster at an address that might not even be current anymore, and drove it to the post office himself rather than handing it to an assistant, the same impulse that had made him drive the codicil to Simone in his own jacket pocket instead of sending it through channels his mother could intercept.
Whatever answer came back, if one came back at all, he intended to be the one who received it first.
? ? ?
He told Simone about the letter that night, the first time in almost two weeks he'd called her instead of waiting for her to call him, and felt something in his chest ease slightly when she picked up on the second ring instead of letting it go to voicemail.
“You wrote her a letter,” Simone said, and he could hear something in her voice shift, not quite warmth yet, but no longer the flat, careful distance of the last twelve days either. “Not a lawyer. Not an investigator. You.”
“I didn't want the first thing she heard from this family in thirty five years to sound like it came from someone managing a problem.” He leaned back in his desk chair, the office dark except for his own lamp, the whole building quiet around him the way it only got after ten at night. “I wanted it to actually be me.”
“That's the first thing you've done since this started that sounds like the man I actually married,” Simone said, quietly, and he understood, hearing it, that she hadn't meant it as forgiveness, not yet, but as something closer to evidence, the kind she'd need to see a great deal more of before evidence became anything resembling trust again.
“I know I have a long way to go.”
“You do,” she agreed. “But this is a start. I'm allowed to notice a start without promising you the whole road yet.”
He held onto that sentence longer than the call itself, after they'd said goodnight, after he'd finally gone up to a bed that still felt too large for one person, the specific, fragile comfort of being told, by the person whose trust he most needed to rebuild, that she was at least still counting.
? ? ?
His mother found him in the kitchen the next morning, before he'd left for the office, and studied him for a beat longer than usual over her coffee, the particular assessing look she gave contracts she suspected of hiding something in the fine print.
“You seem different this week,” Vivian said. “Almost cheerful, for a man in the middle of an IPO crisis and a marital separation. I'd ask what's changed, except I suspect you wouldn't tell me even if I did.”
“I'm handling it,” Marcus said, which was true, and which told her, deliberately, nothing at all, a small private satisfaction he hadn't expected to feel, turning one of her own techniques back toward her for once.
“Handling it how.”
“The way you taught me. Quietly. Carefully. Making sure I actually understand the whole situation before I act on any part of it.” He held her gaze a beat longer than was strictly comfortable, watching for the flicker he'd started learning to look for since Desmond's first phone call.
“You'd be proud of how thoroughly I'm handling it, actually, once you find out everything I've handled.”
Something crossed her face, there and gone, not quite alarm, but close enough to it that Marcus filed the moment away carefully, the way he filed every other small crack he'd started noticing in a composure he used to believe was simply who his mother was, rather than something she had spent thirty five years carefully constructing.
He left for the office without explaining further, and let her wonder, for the first time in his life, what exactly her son had found out.
? ? ?
He flew to London two days later without word back from Margaret yet, the letter barely enough time to have crossed the country let alone find its way into her hands, and spent the flight rehearsing investor answers he no longer entirely believed while an ocean scrolled past beneath him in the dark.
Vivian had wanted to come. He'd told her, evenly, that the London leg was small enough he could handle it alone, and watched her decide, visibly, not to fight him on it, which felt less like a victory than like his mother choosing her battles more carefully now that she suspected he was finally paying attention to the war.
He landed already checking his phone out of habit, the specific, reflexive hope he was trying not to let himself name directly. Nothing from Margaret. One text from Simone, sent hours earlier, while he was still somewhere over the Atlantic.
Good luck in London. I hope it goes well. Not because I've decided anything yet. Because I still, apparently, hope things go well for you, which is its own kind of information I'm choosing to sit with instead of examine too closely right now.
He read it twice before he'd even cleared customs, and carried it with him through three days of investor meetings like a second, quieter kind of currency, the sort that didn't show up on any roadshow deck but mattered, he was beginning to understand, considerably more than the ones that did.