Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Halston
Now . . .
The first time I hear her laugh, I am in a boardroom full of people discussing charity as if it’s an acquisition strategy.
No one else hears it. She’s not even here.
That’s probably the problem.
One second, Margaret Ellery is talking about Florence, compliance, access protocols, and some other phrases designed to make theft sound administrative. The next, a woman’s laugh moves through the back of my mind—quick, dry, intimate enough to touch skin—and my hand forgets how to hold a pen.
It slips.
The silver clip taps the walnut table once. Margaret stops mid-sentence. My cousin, Everett, looks at me from across the table with my father’s pale eyes and my family’s talent for making concern feel like surveillance.
“Halston?” he asks. “Are you all right?”
There it is.
The opening move.
Not ‘Are you listening?’ Not ‘Do you disagree?’ Not ‘What do you remember?’
‘Are you all right?’
Such a neat little weapon when placed in the correct mouth.
“I’m fine.”
My voice comes out even. Of course it does.
I have spent ten years learning how to sound intact in rooms where everyone is waiting for proof I'm not.
If I crack, they will not call it grief.
They will call it regression. They will send me somewhere quiet with excellent linens and discreet medical staff, and another man in a cashmere sweater with patched elbows asking me to name five things I can see.
Right now, I can see twelve vultures in tailored clothing.
I can see the water carafe that no one will touch.
I can see a folder labeled Florence/Restoration Archive sitting next to me.
I can see my own reflection on the polished table, composed enough to offend me.
I can see the pen I dropped that dragged the attention of so many.
There, I found five things. Bill the estate and leave me the fuck alone for a few months.
Margaret’s mouth softens, which, if I’m honest, is worse than if she smiles.
“We can pause.”
“No.” I lift the pen, set it close to the folder, and look at the packet in front of me. “Please, continue.”
The Saint Claire Foundation boardroom has been designed to make virtue look expensive.
It has a walnut table and oxblood leather chairs.
Add the brass fixtures to a tasteful glow.
Art on the far wall, acquired by my grandfather before families like mine learned to put provenance lawyers on retainer.
Everything in the room has been chosen with the severe restraint wealthy people mistake for morality.
No one here has ever wondered whether they deserve the room.
That may be why I have spent most of the day wanting to burn it down.
It wouldn’t be too dramatic. Not even theatrical. Theatricality was bred out of me. It was bred out of all of us, by people who considered visible emotion a failure of breeding unless it could be converted into a gala speech.
So, of course, the fire would be quiet. Efficient. Contained. Definitely legally complicated.
She would be proud of me. Though I’m not sure who she is yet.
The thought arrives so cleanly, so naturally, that for one second I almost turn toward the chair beside me to tell her.
My hand tightens around the pen.
The thought isn’t new. That is what unsettles me. It doesn't feel discovered. It feels returned.
A woman in an apartment, barefoot on my couch. Dark hair caught against her cheek after hours of great sex. Then there is more. Tabs in four colors are spread across legal documents. Orange for betrayal, because apparently betrayal deserved a filing system.
Mrs. Saint Claire has opinions.
I blink, because why would I mention my mother or any other Mrs. Saint Claire? The boardroom snaps back into place.
Margaret is watching me.
So is Everett.
So is everyone else, though most of them have the manners to pretend they are studying grant projections instead of my face. Saint Claires are civilized that way. We only devour in private, through attorneys, trusts, and concerned phone calls placed at terrible hours.
“As I was saying,” Margaret resumes, “the Florence matter remains contained. The institute has been cooperative, though we should continue monitoring access to the restoration archive until the transfer is complete.”
Florence.
There it is again.
A wound someone keeps calling manageable.
“Which institute?” I ask.
There’s another pause.
This one is brief.
Nearly elegant.
Everett glances down at his notes. “The Bianchi Conservation Institute.”
“Why was access amended?”
Margaret looks at Everett.
Not at me, at Everett.
Something behind my eyes burns.
A ring catching warm light. A legal packet under a woman’s hand. A male voice, low and disgusted, from behind me—No one who uses pursuant deserves love.
The fragment hits with no permission and no mercy.
That voice.
A man behind me. A hand on my neck. Expensive cologne worn off by midnight. A mouth that said cruel things in public and true things only when cornered. A body held so carefully it made surrender look painful.
Our husband.
The need for him, or her, is inexplicable.
They’re unattainable because I don’t even know if they exist or if they’re part of some hallucinatory product of what happened to me ten years ago.
But I can feel them—both. I look at my left wrist. The Celtic knot tattoo that I don’t understand.
I can’t remember when I got it, but sometimes it serves as a symbol of hope.
Hope that one day I’ll remember who I was and won’t feel trapped in a life that seems more fabricated than real.
My grip on the pen goes too tight.
Everett says, “The changes were administrative.”
“Administrative changes are usually documented.”
He nods. “They are.”
“Then I want to see the record.”
Margaret folds her hands. She is not a Saint Claire by blood, which has always made her more loyal than those of us cursed with the name. “Halston, the record is part of a larger audit package. It would be more efficient for legal to summarize.”
“I didn’t ask for a summary.”
The sentence comes out colder than I intend.
For a moment, no one moves.
Twelve people sit around a table purchased with money that has passed through so many trusts, shell entities, and charitable vehicles that no one in this room can tell the truth about where it began without checking a binder first. They watch me with careful expressions.
Grief, polished into governance.
Everett leans back. “You’ve been under a great deal of stress lately.”
I almost smile.
There it is. There it is. The words they have spent nine years making sound reasonable. Stress. Recovery. Fragile judgment. Temporary limitations.
They never say the word incapable outright. Instead, they circle the words with expensive pens and practiced concern. Attaching it to every decision I make, until even I’m asking for my own medical records, becomes proof that I'm not ready to have any independence.
Everett doesn't have to threaten me. None of them do.
The restriction is already sitting in the room with us, tucked into the language of the conservatorship they still insist is temporary.
I can own the name on the building, but not the file with my name on it.
I can sit at the head of the table, but only if I behave like a patient grateful for permission.
“I asked for a file.”
“And you’ll have it,” Everett says, calm as a priest and twice as dangerous. “Of course you will. Perhaps not in the middle of a finance discussion.”
“This is a foundation meeting. If a foundation-funded restoration file has been placed under amended access, I consider that relevant.”
Margaret’s fingers press together. “The restriction is temporary.”
Temporary?
The word triggers something again. There’s again the couch.
Yellow tabs. Orange marker. The woman’s bare foot, tucked under my thigh as if she had always known where she fit against me.
A man, behind her, arm around her waist, pretending possession was casual because his pride could survive anything except wanting us where we could see it.
If only I could see their faces, recognize them. So far, they’re just a fucking figment of my imagination. The only thing that feels real in this life, and yet, the only thing that’s unreachable.
Temporary, I hear myself say.
I feel her hand on my face.
Then the pain comes. Not all at once. It spreads through me, low and brutal, something almost physical.
The missing. The empty rooms in my head.
The memories I can’t reach, no matter how badly my soul claws for them.
The dreams that feel too real to dismiss, the fragments that might be mine or might only be grief inventing mercy because I can’t stand not knowing.
I don’t know what I’ve lost.
That is the worst part.
Not the fear. Not the confusion. Not even the ache of looking at someone and feeling my whole body reach for her before my mind understands why.
It’s the possibility that I already had this. That I already loved someone. That I already knew the exact shape of her—or maybe him—beneath me, the warmth of their palm against my cheek, the way they look at me like I am both a wound and a home they refuse to abandon.
And I can’t fucking remember.
So I hide it.
I swallow the sound trying to rise out of me and keep my face still. I let the pain stay buried where no one can touch it, even as it moves through me like something alive, grieving for a life I may have already lived and a love I may have already ruined.
I learned young that pain is another person’s property the moment it shows.
My father taught me that without ever saying the words. My grandfather perfected the lesson before that. Saint Claire men don't fall apart. We excuse ourselves, close doors, cut checks, drink too much, disappear for entire winters, then return in better suits and pretend no one noticed the seams.
That’s what happened to me.
The story goes that my alcoholism nearly killed someone, and that I’m lucky to be alive. There are so many holes in my brain—and in their version of the truth—that I can’t even argue with it properly.