19. Soleil
NINETEEN
SOLEIL
I stood at my kitchen counter in sweatpants and a sweatshirt I'd pulled from the bottom of a drawer — and stared at the mug in my hands.
Too much water. The grounds floating on the surface like sediment.
He always drank it without complaint. Every cup.
Every morning. His face perfectly flat while I handed him something undrinkable and he took a sip and said nothing because saying nothing was how Nolan Reeves loved someone.
I set the mug down and pressed my palms against the counter.
The phone call was still in my body — his voice cracking open in the dark, the apology that sounded like it was being pulled out of him by the roots.
I love you, Soleil. Three words I wasn't ready to hear from the man who made me doubt every true thing I'd ever felt.
I almost broke. I heard myself start his name — Nolan — and the pull was so strong it was muscular, a reflex I had to override with every rational part of myself.
Don't call me again. I said it and meant it and had been pressing on it since.
It still hurt.
A knock at my door. I crossed the room and opened it.
Rhys stood in the hallway looking like he'd slept in his car.
The suit jacket gone, the shirt untucked, the collar open, wrinkled like he'd been wearing it for days.
He hadn't showered. His hair was flat on one side, pressed from sleeping against something that wasn't a pillow.
His eyes were bloodshot and raw and the skin beneath them was gray.
The evasion had lived behind his smile for fifteen years, and the wall he hid behind at every dinner and every phone call where his voice went loose and wrong was gone.
Whatever had cracked on those front steps when I walked out of our father's study had finished breaking, and he was standing in my doorway with the rubble all over him.
I stepped aside. He walked in, sat on my couch, and dropped his head into his hands.
I didn't fill the silence. I was done filling silences for the men in my family.
The minutes stretched. My radiator clicked. A car horn sounded on the street below. Rhys's breathing was ragged, uneven, the sound of a man working up to something that had been locked in his chest for half his life.
He lifted his head. His eyes found mine.
"Her name was Adira."
I sat on the floor across from him. Cross-legged. My back against the wall. I didn't move.
"We met at a party. Mutual friends. She was — " His voice caught.
He cleared his throat. Started again. "She was nineteen.
I was twenty. She was studying education.
She wanted to teach. And she smiled at me across this crowded room, and I just — " He pressed his fist against his mouth.
Held it there. His jaw was working behind his knuckles.
"I meant it, Sol. That's what you have to understand.
I wasn't playing with her. I loved her. I loved her the way you're supposed to love someone when you're twenty and stupid, and you think the world is going to let you keep the good things. "
His hand dropped from his mouth. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his eyes on the floor.
"She got pregnant. And for about three weeks, it was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
We talked about names. She wanted something that meant light.
I said that was cheesy. She threw a pillow at me, and I caught it and pulled her onto the couch, and we just — we sat there.
Laughing. Planning. Like the future was this thing we could hold in our hands. "
The radiator clicked again. I pressed my fingernails into my palms.
"Then I told Dad."
The words dropped into the room like stones into water. The silence rippled around them.
"He didn't yell. He never yells. He just — his face changed.
That thing he does where the warmth stays but everything underneath it rearranges.
" Rhys's hands were trembling on his knees.
"Two days later, Adira's landlord stopped returning her calls.
The management company that handled her building — it traced back to us.
I didn't know that then. I found out later.
Her employer eliminated her position. Out of nowhere.
No warning. Then the stories started — whispered through the right circles.
About instability. About a girl from nowhere chasing a name. "
His voice went flat. The flatness was worse than breaking — it was the sound of a man who'd said these sentences to himself a thousand times in the dark and never once out loud.
"Dad sent me abroad. No warning, no discussion. One day, I was holding her hand, talking about baby names, and the next day, I was on a plane. His lawyers were at her door with a settlement and an NDA that said none of it happened." He swallowed. "The stress took the baby."
I pressed my hand over my mouth. The tears were hot behind my eyes, but I held them because this wasn't my grief. This was his. He was the one who needed to say it.
"I watched him erase her, Sol." His voice was barely audible now.
"I watched my father take a nineteen-year-old girl who loved me and compress her into a nondisclosure clause.
And I let him. Because I was twenty and scared and his voice was the only authority I'd ever known and I chose the easy thing.
" He looked at me. His eyes were wet. "And it destroyed someone I loved. "
He told me about the photograph in his wallet.
The block he drove past more often than geography required.
The drinking that started after and never stopped — not because he couldn't stop, but because stopping would mean sitting with what he'd done in full clarity, and the clarity was worse than the hangover.
I looked at my brother. The polished heir was gone. The golden boy who smiled through everything and who drank too much at family dinners. What sat on my couch was a man who'd been drowning since he was twenty and had finally stopped pretending he could swim.
"Are you ever going to apologize to her?" I asked. "To Adira?"
He looked at his hands. His jaw worked. "Someday. Maybe. I can't — I can't face her yet. The shame is — " He shook his head. "How do you look at someone whose life you helped destroy and say you're sorry?"
I thought about Nolan on the phone. I want to make this right. However long it takes. Two men who hurt the people they loved and were both standing in the wreckage asking for more time.
I pushed that thought away.
"Then help me do something about it now."
The gallery was quiet when I arrived. The grandmother's kitchen hung on the far wall, the flour still suspended in the painted air.
The concrete floor was cool under my boots.
The space smelled like turpentine and the rosemary on the windowsill and the particular stillness of a room that was waiting to be filled.
Margaux was behind the desk. She looked up when I walked in, and whatever she saw on my face made her set her phone down and stand.
"Sit," she said. She pulled the second chair around to my side of the desk.
I sat. I pulled up the photographs on my phone and handed it to her.
She scrolled in silence. Her dark bob fell forward, hiding her expression.
Her thumb moved across the screen — page after page, NDA after NDA, settlement after settlement.
Her jaw tightened with each swipe. She reached my mother's letter.
Read it twice. Looked at the photograph of Hugh laughing. Set the phone on the desk.
"Whatever you decide," she said, "I'm here. And the gallery survives either way. We'll figure it out."
I picked up the phone. Scrolled back to one file.
Reeves, A. The signature — small, unsteady, the handwriting of someone whose hand was shaking.
My father's signature beside it. The two losses of my life colliding in a single document.
Nolan lied to me because of what was on this page.
My father destroyed a girl because of what was on this page.
The entire architecture of my heartbreak traced back to this signature.
I could put the phone in a drawer. Go back to being Hugh Lattimore's daughter. Accept the gallery on his terms, the lease on his terms, the life on his terms. The cage was beautiful and the man who built it loved me in the only way he knew how.
My mother's handwriting. This isn't who you are. This isn't who I married. A woman asking a man to be better. A plea that went unanswered. She couldn't stop him. Rhys couldn't stop him. Nolan tried with fifteen years of revenge, and it only made things worse.
I called Rhys. He picked up on the first ring.
"I'm going. Are you with me?"
"Yes."
Brother and sister. The Lattimore children walking into a federal building with photographs of their father's crimes on a phone.
The elevator took us to the fourth floor. A long hallway. Fluorescent lights.
Rhys walked beside me, his hands in his pockets, his jaw set. He looked straight ahead. I looked straight ahead. We didn't speak because there was nothing left to say that the documents on my phone wouldn't say louder.
The woman behind the desk had short gray hair and reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She looked at us over the glasses when we sat down.
I set my phone on the desk. "My name is Soleil Lattimore.
My father is Hugh Lattimore. I have evidence of a pattern of coercion, financial intimidation, and forced nondisclosure agreements spanning decades.
" My voice was steady. My hands were not.
I pressed them flat on my thighs. "I'd like to file a report. "
She picked up the phone, scrolled through the first three pages, set it down, picked up her desk phone, and dialed.
For the next two hours, I answered questions. Names. Dates. The structure of the settlements. The shell companies. The routing of the payments.
Rhys corroborated — the things he witnessed, the choices he didn't stop. His voice shook as he spoke about Adira. He gripped the arm of his chair so hard his knuckles went white. But he didn't leave. He stayed in the chair. He owed Adira that much and more, and this was the beginning of more.
When it was done, we walked outside. Stood on the steps. The city moved around us — the taxis, pedestrians, a woman pushing a stroller, a man on his phone laughing about something that had nothing to do with us. The world continued as if two people hadn't just set fire to their own family.
Rhys looked at me. "He'll never forgive us."
"I know."
"Are you okay?"
I stood on those steps and let the question land.
I'd lost my father to the truth. I'd lost Nolan to lies.
The life I thought I had dissolved the moment two men in a corridor said words I wasn't supposed to hear.
I'd just turned in the man who raised me, and the only person I wanted to call was the one I'd told not to.
"No," I said. "But I will be."
The Vanguard office was quieter than it should have been.
Fewer people in the corridor. A tension in the air I didn't understand.
I didn't know about the deals dying, the contacts going cold, the lawsuits.
I only knew that the man sitting at his desk when I walked through the door looked like he'd aged a year in a week.
Nolan looked up. His eyes found mine, and the hope that broke across his face was unbearable — naked, desperate, the face of a man who hadn't slept and had been waiting for this door to open since I told him not to call.
His lips parted. His hands gripped the edge of his desk.
His whole body leaned toward me like a plant toward light.
"I took the files to the authorities." I stopped 3 ft. from his desk. My voice was even. My hands were clasped in front of me. "My father's files. The NDAs, the settlements, your sister's name. All of it."
He stared at me. His grip on the desk went white.
"I didn't do it for you. I did it for me. And for every woman whose name was in that drawer."
His mouth opened. I held up my hand.
"I'm not finished." I took a breath. The woman who used to avoid hard truths was looking directly at the hardest one.
"You lied to me every single day. You made me fall in love with a version of you that was built to get through my door.
I understand why. I've seen what my father did.
I've read the files. I know what he is now.
" I swallowed. "But understanding why doesn't mean I forgive how. "
I stepped closer. Not with warmth. With the precision of a woman who had chosen every word before she walked into this room.
"You used me. Don't dress it up. Don't tell me it became real.
Don't tell me you fell in love somewhere along the way.
" My voice was steady. "I need you to hear this.
I didn't do this because you showed me the truth.
I didn't do this because of your phone call.
I did this because I finally looked for myself.
" I held his gaze. "You don't get credit for my courage. That's mine."
He was looking at me the way he'd looked at me the first night — across the gallery, the stillness that had its own gravity.
Except now I knew what was behind it. The sadness the sketch caught.
The man underneath the weapon. I could see him — the real one, the one who called me in the dark and cracked open and said I love you like it was the first time he'd ever meant anything.
I saw him, and it wasn't enough.
"I loved you." Quietly. "I loved you, and you knew it, and you used it. That's what I can't get past. Not the vendetta. Not my father. The fact that you held something I gave you freely and turned it into a tool."
His mouth was open. The words were forming. I could see them pressing forward, the I love you pushing against his teeth again. I could feel the pull. The same gravity from the phone call. The thing between us that hadn't died despite everything that should have killed it.
I turned. Walked out. Didn't wait for him to speak. My heels clicked down the corridor, past the conference room, past the reception desk where a woman glanced up and looked away. The elevator doors opened. I stepped in and pressed the button.
The doors closed, and I leaned against the wall and pressed my fist to my mouth and breathed through it until the shaking stopped.