14. Chapter 14
Jade
The pearl earrings sit on my collarbone like small cold debts.
I put them in because the PR team left them on my dresser and because today requires the full costume.
Silk blouse, structured cardigan, the wedding ring catching every stray beam of morning light like it's trying to announce something.
I have been Mrs. Graham Sterling for eleven days.
I am still learning what that costs by the hour.
Mrs. Gable's committee meets at ten in the back room of the historical society, a room that smells of old paper and the particular determination of women who have run this town for thirty years and intend to run it for thirty more.
I find my seat, accept the offered tea, and arrange my face into the expression I have been practicing in the house mirror.
Warm. Settled. Not for sale.
"The summer gala is the heartbeat of this town, Jade." Mrs. Gable's voice is like warm honey poured over gravel. She leans forward, eyes scanning me with the precision of a woman who has spent forty years sorting locals from interlopers. "Your husband's donation is transformative."
"Graham believes in investing in the future of the lake. We want Linden Lake to be more than just a summer retreat for Iris. We want it to be home."
A woman across the table tilts her head, her gaze landing on the pearls at my throat. Cordelia something. She runs the antique shop on Main. She prices them like another woman might price a horse. Six-millimeter. South Sea. Thirty-thousand, maybe more. Her smile doesn't change.
"Such lovely earrings, dear."
"They were a gift."
"It's quite a transition for a man of his reputation," pipes up Brenda, her neck draped in enough turquoise to sink a boat. "To go from New York's most eligible bachelor to a family man in a lakeside fixer-upper. And with such a young, vibrant wife. It's almost like a fairytale, isn't it?"
The age-gap comment sits there. A silent question about what I'm being paid, or what I'm hiding.
I set my cup down with a deliberate soft click against the saucer. I let the silence stretch just long enough to make Brenda shift in her seat.
"Life has a way of rearranging your priorities when you lose someone you love.
Graham isn't looking for a fairytale, Brenda.
He's looking for peace. And he's found that with me, and with Iris.
Surely, as a mother yourself, you can understand the desire to protect a child's stability above all else. "
Mrs. Gable nods sharply, signaling a shift in the social winds. The committee moves on to the silent auction.
I spend the next hour navigating committee politics, nodding at the right moments and deflecting every subtle probe into Graham's past. By the time I step out onto the sidewalk, the sun is high and my head is throbbing.
I have been performing for ninety minutes straight. I am getting very good at it, and the fact that I am getting good at it is its own kind of exhausting.
I'm headed toward the SUV when a woman steps out from the shade of the local boutique.
Linen the color of bone. Blonde hair pulled back so tight it makes her cheekbones look like a complaint. The bitten thumbnail is the only thing about her that isn't lacquered. I recognize her before she speaks.
Tiffany. The woman who appeared on our dock six weeks ago with a warning and expensive perfume.
"The new Mrs. Sterling. I saw you in there. You're very good. The way you handled Brenda was masterful."
"I'm just doing my part for the committee. Tiffany, right?"
"We haven't really met. But I know the type." She steps closer. "Graham has a thing for projects. Usually a vintage Porsche or a tech startup he can strip for parts. This time it's a family."
"He's a father trying to do right by his daughter."
"He's a Sterling. They don't do right, they do necessary.
" She glances around the empty sidewalk, then steps closer, the brightness in her face fading.
"I'm going to do you one favor, since nobody did me one.
The man I tried to point you toward on the dock.
His name is Christopher Harrington. Senior strategy.
Graham brought him up himself, mentored him for years. "
I keep my face neutral. I file the name.
"Two years ago, I dated Christopher for six months.
He moved into my apartment for half of it.
In that time, in bed, on weekends, at dinners with his friends, he laid out in detail the four-year plan he had for taking Graham Sterling's company away from him.
" She pauses. " I thought he was venting, but he had spreadsheets.
By the third month I realized he was recruiting.
He wanted me to write a piece. I wrote for one of the smaller gossip outlets back then. "
"You said no."
"I said no. I left. I told myself Christopher would either move on or get himself fired in the normal way.
Six weeks ago, he showed up at my apartment with a folder.
Photos from old tabloids. Police reports.
Pages I won't describe. He offered me a number with a lot of zeros to plant a piece on Graham.
I said no. I shut the door. He sat on my couch like he still owned a key and told me he was running it with or without me. "
She holds my gaze.
"So, I got in my car and drove three hours to look at the new wife and decide whether she was somebody who could be told. You can be told. Don't make me regret it."
She turns and walks back to her car. She doesn't look back.
I stand on the sidewalk watching her go, her words settling into my chest like stones dropped in cold water. I don't move for a full minute. Christopher Harrington has a name, a floor number, and a four-year head start.
I walk back toward the lake house.
I am not going to soften it. I am not going to manage Graham's reaction. We crossed a line on our wedding night and we have not crossed back. The intel goes to him whole, in the order I received it, and we figure out what to do with it together.
I'm halfway across the main street when I see Graham's SUV in the parking lot of the diner. Graham is standing outside it, and Tiffany's car is pulled up alongside, and the two of them are in conversation.
I stop.
I don't go closer. I read it from where I am.
Graham's posture is contained. Not aggressive.
The stillness he uses when he's decided something and is waiting for the other person to catch up.
Tiffany is talking. He is listening with his arms at his sides, his chin level, his face doing nothing at all.
She finishes. He says something short. She gets in her car. He watches her leave.
He doesn't look shaken. He looks like a man who has just confirmed something he already knew and didn't want to be right about.
Then he turns and sees me across the street.
We walk toward each other without discussing it.
Neither of us speaks on the drive home. He keeps one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the console between us, palm up, and I lace my fingers through his somewhere past the diner.
He doesn't look at me when I do it. He just closes his hand around mine and holds on.
Twenty minutes later, the kitchen smells like this morning's coffee and the cedar of the new shelves. Graham is leaning against the counter with his phone face-down on the marble, which means the call with Voss has already happened.
"Voss pulled the badge log first thing this morning.
Before your committee meeting. Christopher's access code.
That gave me a name, but just the access.
No motive. No outside picture." He pauses.
"Tiffany filled in what Voss couldn't touch.
The history. The plan. The fact that this has been running for four years.
I needed both to know what I was actually dealing with. "
"So, neither one was enough on its own."
"No. Now I need a clean trace. I'm going to seed false information into the prep documents on the server and wait for him to move it."
"You're going to bait him."
"I'm going to bait him."
He says it with the flat certainty of a man who has made the decision and is done deliberating. But underneath the certainty I can see the other thing. The thing he won't name.
This isn't just a corporate threat. Christopher sat in his office. Christopher drank his scotch. Christopher came to Chloe's funeral and shook Graham's hand at the graveside. Iris was four. She was holding Graham's other hand. Christopher would have looked down at her.
I cross the kitchen to him. I reach up and put my hand on the side of his jaw, the way he does to me when he needs me to stop moving and look at him. The stubble is rough against my palm. He goes still.
"Graham."
He looks at me. The mask is still up, but just barely.
"I know. Not the company part. The other part. The part where someone you built sat across from you and decided you were worth more as a target than a person."
He doesn't answer. He covers my hand with his, pressing it harder against his jaw for a moment, and then he lets go.
"My mother's prescription. The pharmacy called this morning. The new iron supplement and the second medication her specialist wants her on are ready for pickup. I was going to go to the city Friday, but the local pharmacy can fill it from here on out once they coordinate with her Manhattan doctor."
"Send a courier today. I don't want you driving in alone."
"Graham."
"It's not negotiable, Jade. Christopher has known your name for at least six weeks. He knows where to look for leverage. I want that prescription here today and I want your mother out of that apartment by Friday."
I stand there for a beat. Three weeks ago, I would have argued the point down to its foundations. Today I just nod, because he isn't wrong, and because the man looking at me right now isn't using my mother as a bargaining chip. He's trying to keep her safe.
That's the thing my mother told me to watch for. The reach into the pocket versus the reach toward you.
My brother moved to Phoenix at nineteen and stopped picking up the phone by twenty-three.
The mother-care fell to me by default. I never resented it.
I only wished he'd call her on her birthday.
Graham reaching for the courier number is the closest anyone has come to standing next to me on this in a decade.
I turn toward the hallway to get my phone. Then I stop at the door.
"Graham."
"Yeah."
"Whatever you do with Christopher's name. I want to hear it before anyone else does. I'm not the help anymore. If I'm going to share a war with you, I'm going to share the intel."
He holds my gaze for a long moment. Then he nods. Once. The kind of nod that means it.
"You'll be the first call I make."
I nod back. I leave the kitchen with my phone in my hand and the courier's number already pulled up.
Upstairs, before I dial, I detour to the master bathroom to grab the pill case from the counter. It is not on the counter. It is not where I left it last night. I check the medicine cabinet, the drawer where I keep my hair ties, the small dish by the sink.
I find it on the floor next to the trash can. Iris was up here this morning playing with Justice and Judge. She must have knocked it off the counter at some point. The case is closed, undamaged.
I count the tablets through the plastic. I took yesterday's late. I took the day before's late. And the wedding day. The wedding day I missed entirely. The case sat on the counter while I was getting dressed and I never came back to it.
Three slips in a week and one miss.
I am not a woman who has slips. I am the woman who set an alarm at seven a.m. when I was nineteen and never silenced it. Until this house. Until this man.
I sit on the closed lid of the toilet and let myself, for one minute, consider the question I have been refusing.
Then I take today's pill and stand up.
Tomorrow. I will think about it tomorrow.
I close the case. I tuck it into the inside pocket of my purse where I will see it before I leave the house in the morning. I dial the courier.
When I call my mother next, she answers on the second ring, which means she's been sitting near the phone, already knowing something is wrong.
The courier calls back forty minutes later.
"Ma'am, I'm sorry. The pharmacy in Linden Lake won't release a controlled prescription to a third party without the patient present or a notarized authorization on file. Manhattan rules are different. Small towns have their own."
"Of course, they do."
"I can drive your mother up Friday if you want. That's the soonest I can get the paperwork through."
Friday is three days away. The prescription is ready today. My mother's last dose ran out yesterday.
I thank him and hang up.
I stand at the window of the master bedroom and look across the lawn at the carriage house, then down the hall toward Graham's study. He told me, in plain language, that he didn't want me driving in alone.
I think about the photographer on the county road. I think about Christopher Harrington, a name I have only known for two hours. I think about a sick woman in an apartment in the city, waiting for a pill she has been taking every day for a year.
The drive to the pharmacy is six minutes. The pharmacist is sixty-three years old and her name is Ruth. The parking lot has one streetlight and a view of the diner.
I am not going to make my mother skip a dose because a man with a long lens might be on a county road.
I pick up my purse. I do not tell Graham. He is on a call with Pierce and Voss in the study, and the door is closed, and if I tell him he will insist on sending someone with me, and the someone will draw more attention than I will draw alone.
I tell myself this. I almost believe it.
I drive into town.
Ruth has the prescription ready at the counter. She does not ask questions. She rings it up, slides the white paper bag across the counter, and tells me to give her mother her best. I am back in the SUV in under four minutes.
I do not see the photographer.
He sees me.