Chapter 18 What the Lawsuit Says #2
My love. I've seen something. Call me when you're ready. I'm not worried — you know I'm not the worrying type — but I wanted you to know I saw it, so you don't have to manage whether I've seen it. I love you. The Victoria sponge is cooling. Come home soon.
Anya read it twice. The third time she read it she felt her throat tighten in a way that had nothing to do with distress and everything to do with the specific, underrated grace of being known by a person who loved you.
Her mother was the worrying type. Celeste Pemberton worried about everything and did so at considerable length, usually while performing a parallel task with great efficiency.
She worried while making rice and peas, while reorganising a kitchen cupboard that did not require reorganising, while watering a window box she'd had for sixteen years and clearly knew by now did not need daily intervention.
She worried expressively and at volume and she had never, in Anya's memory, once done it in a way that made Anya feel like the source of the worry was Anya's fault.
She typed back: I saw it too. Call with the lawyer is done. The case is weak and she's going to get it thrown out. I'm okay. Tell me about the sponge.
She pressed send. She waited. The three dots appeared almost immediately.
Lemon. Proper curd, not the jar. I had a moment and bought a box of bergamot from that Italian deli on the high street and now I've made three cakes and there's no one to eat them. Come home soon. I mean it this time.
Anya exhaled slowly, the kind of breath that doesn't solve anything but convinces your chest that the present moment is not, actually, a crisis.
Then she went inside to run the bath.
The en suite bathroom in the opera house's upper guest suite was a room that had been renovated at some point in the mid-century and had never quite decided what it wanted to be.
The original stone walls remained, but someone had installed a claw-foot tub with chrome fittings and replaced the old window with something narrow and deep that looked out onto the courtyard below.
In the early morning it caught the sun. Now, mid-morning, it held grey light, diffuse and cool, the kind of light that pressed gently against everything without illuminating anything in particular.
She ran the water hot, hotter than she needed, and sat on the edge of the tub while it filled and did not look at her phone.
The steam rose and the stone walls held it.
The window went soft with condensation and the courtyard disappeared and she was briefly, blessedly, in a room that had no dimensions she had to manage.
She thought about what it would mean to have her financial history opened up and examined.
Her five years of employment records: the two families before the Sterlings, both of whom had been perfectly decent people who had simply needed a nanny for a finite period and had given her good references and moved on; the gap year she'd taken when she was twenty-two and her father's final illness had made staying in Derbyshire necessary; the graduate degree she'd completed by night while working days because she had not wanted to ask anyone to fund a full-time course; the bakery loan her parents had taken out the year she'd turned seventeen and the way it had felt in her chest when the last payment finally cleared, like something being set down.
All of it, describable in terms of financial precariousness.
All of it, rearrangeable into the story Ashford wanted to tell.
A young Black woman from Brixton who had spent six years in expensive houses, adjacent to wealth she didn't own, until she found one she could stay in.
It was not a story that required any individual lie.
It just required selecting carefully which details to keep.
She knew how the story would be read. She had always known how the story would be read, in certain rooms, by certain people.
She had spent the better part of her adult life doing the small, quiet work of being legible in spaces that hadn't expected her — arriving prepared, arriving early, arriving with her notes already made and her references already organized and her expression calibrated to the precise degree of warmth that invited no misinterpretation.
She had been so careful. She had been so endlessly, exhaustingly careful, and she had never once been careless, and it had not protected her from this.
The tub was full.
She got in.
The water was hot enough to make her skin blush and she lay back until the back of her neck rested on the rolled edge of the tub and the ceiling came into view — plaster, slightly uneven, a hairline crack running from the light fitting toward the window that she'd noticed on their first night here and found oddly comforting.
Imperfection in a baroque thing. A record of something that had shifted and been held.
She lay in the water for thirty minutes.
She did not think about Niles Ashford. She did not rehearse what she might say or how she might explain herself or how she might make the story more palatable to the kind of person who read High Court filings with prior conclusions already formed.
She thought about her mother's lemon sponge, the particular tartness of real curd.
She thought about Harriet's face on the screen — cool and precise and entirely unbothered by the content of what she was describing, the way a surgeon is unbothered by the sight of an open wound because what she's looking at is an opportunity to fix something.
She thought about Cassian saying her name in the mountain refuge with that particular quality of attention she had come to recognize — the way he said it when he meant it, not as a form of address but as a form of acknowledgment, as though the syllables themselves were useful to him.
And then she thought: no.
The no arrived clean and clear, the way decisions sometimes did when the bath water had finally done its work.
She had spent enough of her life making herself smaller.
She had spent enough time pre-editing herself to fit the available space, calibrating her needs to other people's comfort zones, arriving already apologising for whatever she might require.
She had done it out of love, mostly — love for her parents, love for the families she'd worked for, love for Cassian and his children — but she had also done it out of fear, and she was not willing to do it out of fear anymore.
Niles Ashford was counting on her to shrink.
He was counting on her to find the process so humiliating, so invasive, so corrosive to the private dignity she'd spent years assembling, that she would quietly ask Cassian to make it go away — to settle, to concede something, to find the version of this that required the least amount of her life being turned into exhibits.
He was counting on the specific pressure of having her goodness questioned in a document to make her doubt whether the fight was worth it.
He was counting on her to make herself small enough to slip out of the room.
She got out of the tub.
She dried her hair. Not quickly, not impatiently — she dried it with the focused care of someone performing a task she intended to complete properly, section by section, the way her mother had taught her when she was small, with the diffuser on low heat and a patience her teenage self had resented and her adult self had come to understand was not about the hair at all.
It was about the practice of tending to yourself as though you were worth the time.
By the time she was done the light in the bathroom had shifted. Noon somewhere, or close enough.
She got dressed — properly dressed, dark trousers, the cream cashmere jumper Cassian had ordered in triplicate because she'd mentioned once that she loved it and he had said nothing at the time but had three of them delivered to the house two weeks later, which had made her laugh and then made her feel very quietly and particularly loved.
She found her notebook and wrote down the three questions she still wanted answered: what a successful summary judgment would require from her in terms of active participation; whether Harriet had handled actions brought by Ashford before and if so what the pattern was; and whether the filing, once dismissed, could be made subject to a costs order that would make bringing a future frivolous claim financially inadvisable.
She did not write: how do I get out of this. She wrote: what does this actually require.
Then she went to find Cassian.