Chapter Two
My phone was lying on the vanity next to my lipstick. I picked it up, opened the voice recorder, and pressed the red button before my mother finished her next sentence.
I couldn’t have explained the decision, because there wasn’t one. I felt cold all over, and my thoughts were slow, but my thumb found the button anyway. Some part of me had already gone to work, and that part wanted every word recorded.
“Louisa.” Cormac lowered his voice. “The door.”
“It’s locked. Your groomsmen are at the bar, and my daughter is being sewn into that dress. We have time.”
“We talked about this. Not today.”
“Don’t you dare manage me. Not today of all days.” She wasn’t playful anymore. “Today, you are going to stand in front of three hundred people and promise her your life. So, you will stand here first and tell me that nothing changes.”
“Nothing changes.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“Louisa. Nothing has to change. Nothing was ever going to change. The wedding is paperwork.”
“Paperwork.” My mother laughed, and there was nothing warm in it. “Paperwork flies to the Maldives tomorrow. Two weeks in her bed, Cormac. Tell me. Will you touch her the way you touch me?”
“Stop.”
“Answer me.”
“You want the truth?” He sounded tired of the subject, and that was somehow the worst part.
“Ella is safe. She’s cautious, she’s careful, she’s predictable.
She’s the most boring woman I’ve ever been with, and I’ve been with her for four years, so I would know.
You are the one I want. You’ve known that since the first night. ”
I sat in a silk chair in a room full of white roses and listened to my fiancé describe me to my mother. Boring. Predictable. Safe. He didn’t even say it cruelly. He said it without any feeling at all, and that was worse.
“Then show me,” my mother said.
“We don’t have time.”
“Make time. If I have to sit in the front row and watch you promise her forever, you can give me ten minutes first. Show me who you actually want.”
I heard a zipper. I heard my mother laugh, low and pleased. I heard furniture scrape against the floor, and then I heard the rest of it.
He bent her over a desk or a table, I couldn’t tell which, and the microphone clipped to his shirt carried all of it to the bridal suite.
Every breath, every sound their bodies made.
My mother saying his name in a voice I’d never heard her use in my life.
Cormac telling her she was incredible, that she drove him out of his mind, that nobody else came close.
It went on and on. I sat completely still, held the phone, and let it record. I stared at the veil hanging on the wardrobe door, and I didn’t throw up, which was one of the hardest things I’d ever done.
When it was over, I heard fabric being smoothed back into place, a compact clicking open, and my mother breathing slowly back to normal.
“Tell me again why I’m letting you marry her,” she said.
Cormac laughed, quiet and loose. “Because in six weeks, she turns thirty and becomes family trustee, and everything your husband locked away comes under her signature. And your daughter, bless her, signs whatever is put in front of her. She always has.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It is simple. We come back from the honeymoon, we move into the main house, and before her birthday, I sit her down and explain that the transition doesn’t need to eat her life.
The bank comes in as investment manager.
Custody of the liquid portfolio moves to us.
She opens her personal accounts with us for the distributions, and she signs a limited power of attorney so I can handle the day-to-day.
An outside lawyer drafts it, everything looks clean, everyone’s protected.
She’ll be relieved, Louisa. She will thank me for it. ”
“And me? When she’s trustee, what am I?”
“You’re the family adviser. Nothing about your life changes. The fee goes away, but your influence doesn’t. You gave me the asset schedule. I know exactly what’s in that trust and exactly how to keep it managed the way you want it managed.”
“She’ll sign,” my mother said. “She’s always needed someone to tell her what to do. Her father made the same mistake, thinking a birthday would turn her into me.”
“Fix your hair,” Cormac said. “And Louisa. Front row. Proud mother of the bride. Best performance of your life.”
“Darling,” my mother said, “I’ve been giving it for twenty-nine years.”
The door on his end opened and closed. Her heels clicked away down a corridor. A minute later, the audio cut out completely, and I understood the technician had muted the channels for the ceremony.
I stopped the recording. Twenty-six minutes.
What I understood right then and there was that they were not afraid.
Not of the staff, not of the guests, not of me.
They hadn’t lowered their voices for most of it.
They’d discussed the trust, the bank, the power of attorney, my signature, the way two people discussed a car they’d already bought.
They’d decided I would sign, obey, and never look.
The plan wasn’t clever. It didn’t need to be.
It only needed me to stay exactly who I’d always been.
I uploaded the recording to the storage drive of the private account I’d kept since college, the one nobody knew about.
Then I uploaded a second copy to a secure cloud folder, and set a new password, one Cormac had never watched me type.
Finally, I opened both copies and confirmed they played perfectly.
At the hospital, we called that redundancy.
You built it before the emergency, not during.
My mother would come back to the suite to help me dress. I could not be in it when she did.
I took my phone and went out into the corridor, which Lucian had told me was restricted. I’d made it about thirty feet when Lucian came around the corner with a folder in his hand.
“Miss Tremaine.” He looked at my face, and whatever he saw there, he didn’t ask about it. He just waited.
“I need three things,” I said. My voice came out level, which surprised me.
“A room on this floor. Fifteen minutes where no one speaks to me and no one knows where I am. And the sound-check equipment. The receiver and monitor in the bridal suite, the groom’s microphone, and whatever technical logs your system keeps.
I need all of it preserved exactly as it is.
Nothing reset, nothing wiped, nothing thrown away. ”
He was quiet for, perhaps, two seconds. Then he opened a door a few steps down the corridor, a private sitting room with a sofa and a desk.
“No one will know you’re here. I’ll put a written hold on the equipment myself, and I’ll have the logs pulled and secured within the hour. Nothing gets touched.”
“Thank you.”
He checked his watch. “Fifteen minutes, starting now.” And he closed the door.
He didn’t ask a single question. I noticed that, because I was learning a great deal that day about who people were underneath what they said.
I locked the door and sat on the edge of the desk. I thought the way I thought at work when a system failed: options, costs, outcomes.
Option one: disappear. I could take the service elevator, get my car, and drive.
By dinner, my mother would’ve told three hundred guests that I’d fallen ill, or panicked, or had an episode.
The wedding would be postponed, not canceled.
Cormac would be rehabilitated by next week.
The pressure would start again after, gentle and constant, and there would be a story on file about my nerves six weeks before I took control of a fortune.
I could already say their lines for them, both of them, word for word.
Option two: confront them privately. They would deny it. Or they would admit it and close ranks, and it would become my grief to manage, one more problem handled indoors for the family’s sake. My mother was very good indoors.
Option three. Walk down the aisle, look Cormac Williams in the face, and end it in front of every guest, every donor, every person whose opinion my mother had ever performed for. No explanation.
The reason was mine now, the reason was evidence, and I wasn’t going to waste it on a hallway argument.
But the ending itself, the refusal, that would be witnessed.
Three hundred witnesses. My mother couldn’t reschedule that.
She couldn’t announce a migraine over it.
There were things even she couldn’t direct.
When the knock came, I opened the door myself.
I went back to the bridal suite and let them dress me.
My bridesmaids fussed and glowed. My mother returned with her lipstick freshly done and told me I looked like a queen.
I said, “thank you”, and I stood still while she settled the veil on my hair with both hands and blinked hard, ready to cry right on time.
I smiled at her in the mirror. I performed.
She’d raised me, after all. I’d had excellent teachers.
When the technician came back up to fit my microphone, I sent him away.
My mother objected – the videographer, the vows, the package she’d paid for.
I said the bride would not be wearing a microphone today, and I said it in a voice I normally saved for vendors.
She looked at me for a second, decided it was nerves, and let it go.
The bouquet sat in its box by the door – white roses, hers and not mine. I picked it up.
Lucian stood in the corridor, coordinating with two staff members. I met his eyes.
“The microphones,” I said. “All of them stay muted during the ceremony, start to finish. Nothing gets transmitted in that ballroom today.”
He didn’t ask why. “Nothing will be.”
“Tell them I’m ready,” I said.