Chapter 24 #2
I can’t believe she’s here. After the Carlyle, I would’ve bet my bottom dollar I’d never see her again unless it involved a lawyer and a very long table. And yet, here she is, standing in my kitchen, looking at my life through a lens I never thought she possessed.
She turns back to me, the light from the window catching the diamonds on her hand—stones that cost more than this entire building. “I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m here, Annemarie.”
“Kind of,” I admit. The words feel sticky in my throat. “I thought you’d…disowned me. Right along with Dad.”
She sighs, a sound of genuine weariness that softens the perfect line of her shoulders.
“I had no idea things would escalate the way they did. I tried to talk to him afterwards, truly, but he was already on the phone with lawyers. To get your name off the family accounts, the estate documents…everything.” She pauses, her gaze flitting to the floor, then back to me.
She actually looks…embarrassed. “I am sorry. For how that happened.”
I stare at her. I don’t think I’ve heard my mother say the words I’m sorry in my entire life. Not when I fell off my bike, not when I didn’t get the lead in the school play, not when my world fell apart. It’s a shift in the bedrock of us.
“Then why?” The question bursts out, raw. “Why do you stay with him? He disowned your only child, called her a whore and you’re still standing beside him.”
“Because he’s my husband, Annemarie.” She says it with a finality. Then, softer: “Maybe I was raised in a different time, but women of my generation…we don’t leave simply because we don’t like something.”
“It’s not about disliking something, Mom,” I scoff, the old frustration bubbling up. “It’s about him being shitty to your only daughter. Can you just admit that, for once? That his behavior is shitty?”
For a long moment, she just looks at me.
Then, she squares her shoulders. “I’m trying to make it right in the ways I can.
I spoke to my lawyer.” She takes a step closer, her voice dropping, as if my father might be listening through the water-stained ceiling.
“Your father can withdraw his portion of the trust. But he cannot touch your grandfather’s.
Clive’s will, the trust he left for you…
it’s ironclad, Annemarie. He has no power over it. ”
A strange numbness starts in my fingertips. “He’ll try.”
“He can’t.” Her voice is firm, unshakable. “You were left twelve million dollars by your grandfather. You’ll receive it right before the New Year.”
Twelve million dollars.
The room feels like it’s tilting. Twelve million dollars.
The number is so large it feels abstract.
I could buy a place. A real place with a radiator that doesn’t scream at 3 AM.
I could spoil Emma with every book in Manhattan and make sure Cori’s baby never wants for anything.
I could even buy a car, though the thought of parallel parking in a snowstorm makes me want to die.
I could…I could have a wedding. A real one, if Leo ever asked.
The thought is so terrifying and sweet I have to shove it aside.
She reaches into her leather clutch and pulls out a thick cream envelope. “And I want you to have this.”
I open it and find a check for fifty thousand dollars. The zeros swim before my eyes. I haven’t seen a comma in my bank account in…I can’t remember.
My hand is steady as I hold it back out to her. “Keep it.”
“Annie—”
“I don’t want your money. And I don’t want you to think you can buy…this.” I gesture between us, at the fragile, new thing stretching in the space.
She doesn’t take the envelope. Instead, she closes her cool, smooth hands around mine, forcing my fingers to curl around the paper.
“I want you to have it because you are my daughter. And believe it or not, I want to see you succeed.” Her eyes flick around the apartment again, and for the first time, there’s a hint of her old dry humor.
“It might help you move out of this…charmingly rustic shoebox. Please. Take it. Continue building this…this beautiful life.” Her voice wavers, just for a second. “You deserve to have beautiful things.”
The lump in my throat is back, massive and aching. I will not cry. I have a daily quota, and I blew through it minutes ago watching a station wagon drive away. Instead, I do something I haven’t done since I was a child. I step forward and wrap my arms around her.
She goes stiff for a heartbeat—a marble statue in a camel coat—but then she leans in. She pats my back awkwardly, the way you might comfort a strange cat, but it’s there. The effort is there.
“I want to see you,” I whisper into her shoulder. “I want you to know Leo. And Emma. You’d love her, Mom. She’s…she’s a force of nature.”
She pulls back, her composure carefully reassembled, and looks back at the fridge, at Emma’s wide smile. She’s quiet for a full minute, the only sound the distant wail of a siren.
“I think I would like that,” she says, finally. Then, so quietly I almost miss it: “You don’t think it’s too late for us, Annemarie? For you and me to…get to know each other?”
The hope in her voice is a tiny, fragile bird. “It’s never too late,” I say, and I mean it.
She nearly smiles—a genuine, flickering thing. “I would love to stay longer but I have to go. I have a meeting with Martin Scorsese. I’ve landed a role in his new project. It seems I’m playing a very complicated matriarch.”
“You’re acting again?” I ask, my heart lifting. “Mom, that’s amazing. Really.”
She shrugs, though I can see the spark of excitement she’s trying to hide. “It’s true what they say about old dogs and new tricks, I suppose. I’ll be in the city quite a bit this spring and summer for filming. Perhaps we can…find some time for dinners or seeing the city.”
“I’d love that.”
She nods, content, and moves toward the door, pausing with her hand on the knob. When she turns back, her eyes travel to my green plaid knit and she pinches a bit of the wool between two fingers. “Please do me a favor and burn this, darling.”
She gives me a sharp, elegant smirk and starts down the stairs, her heels clicking a rhythmic, expensive beat against the wood.
I stand in the doorway, clutching the envelope and the memory of her hug, and I start to laugh.
***********
It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m curled up on Leo’s couch with a glass of champagne in my hand, watching Dick Clark count down to midnight on the TV.
The apartment is a soft, warm cave against the sharp, celebratory cold outside. The only light comes from the TV, flickering with the pre-midnight festivities from Times Square, and from the strands of fairy lights we’d woven through Emma’s paper chain garland.
We’d made it back in early December, a riot of colored construction paper loops she’d glued together with intense focus.
It had stretched nearly the entire length of the living room, a cheerful, glittery, crinkly rainbow.
Every night at dinner, she’d stand on a chair, select a loop, and tear it off with a satisfying rip.
Tonight, we’d torn off the very last one—a gold loop for New Year’s Eve.
She’d been buzzing with the solemn duty of it.
She’d sworn, with the fierce conviction only a five-year-old can muster, that she would stay awake until midnight.
“I’m a big kid now, Daddy. I can do it.” Leo had just nodded, said, “We’ll see,” and poured her a tiny, ceremonial cup of sparkling cider.
Now, at eleven-fifty, she’s sprawled across the other sofa, a tangle of limbs and striped pajamas, snoring softly against a pile of throw pillows.
The “party” hat she insisted on wearing is currently flattened under her cheek.
In the quiet, the little pops and fizzes from our glasses of champagne feel extravagantly loud.
Leo passes me my flute. “To almost making it,” he whispers, nodding toward our sleeping chaperone.
I clink my glass gently against his. “She went out in a blaze of glory.”
My feet are tucked under his thigh on the couch, and his free hand rests on my ankle, his thumb making absent, soothing circles.
I’m quiet for a moment, watching the throngs of people in Times Square on the screen.
They look cold, packed together like sardines in knitted hats, waiting for a ball to drop.
My mind is blocks away, tucked into the desk drawer of my apartment, where a thick packet of cream-colored stationery sits.
I haven’t told him yet. I’ve been holding my trust close to my chest, partially because I needed to see the ink to believe it, and partially because I’ve spent my time waiting for my father to pull the rug out from under my feet.
I expected a phone call from a lawyer saying there had been a “clerical error” or a “reinterpretation of intent.”
But it turns out that a properly structured trust, especially one set up by a man as meticulous as my grandfather, isn’t so easily dismantled by a furious father.
The terms were the terms. I was to receive my grandfather’s trust no sooner than December of 1994.
My heart had hammered against my ribs as I’d read the sterile, financial-ese.
Per the directives of the Collier Family Trust, established by Clive Atticus Collier…
the sum has been vested to the beneficiary, Annemarie June Collier…
assets have been liquidated and transferred to the designated account…
There were phone numbers to call. An assigned account manager with a very calm, reassuring voice named Charles.
There were forms to sign, sent via overnight mail, which I’d done at a FedEx office with trembling hands.
And then, two days ago, a call from Charles.
“The wire has cleared, Miss Collier. The funds are available.”