Chapter Sixteen #2
She let us in. The apartment was expensively, almost antiseptically, perfect.
Not a magazine out of place, not a throw pillow that had ever been sat upon.
The walls were the soft off-white of a West Elm showroom; the view was panoramic, the skyline visible in a slab of glass the size of a tennis court.
At the far end of the living room, already seated, was Rosamund Vance.
If there was a lawyer more self-assured in a pantsuit, I had never met her. She rose, slow and deliberate, and extended a hand. “Kenneth. Miles. Jude.” She did not offer any line to Jude, just let his name sit there for a moment.
Carolyn gestured to the seating area. “Let’s not stand on ceremony,” she said, voice velvet and venom. “I’m sure we’re all on the same page by now.”
Jude did not sit. He stood behind the end of the couch, hands gripping the wood frame, gaze on the tabletop. I took the center chair, the better to control the sight lines, and Miles settled beside me, legs crossed, every line of his posture telegraphing that this was a negotiation, not a visit.
I set the folder on the table. “We’ll be direct,” I said.
“Always preferred,” said Carolyn, eyes glittering.
I let the silence settle just long enough to set the rhythm.
Then I said, “We know you reached out to Aldous Pryce before the engagement. We know about the side deal. We know about the blackmail on Edward Taylor, and that Vance built the structure using Mercer. You had a majority stake before you even RSVP’d to the engagement party. ”
Carolyn’s expression did not flicker. Vance looked at her, not at me, and raised one brow just a fraction. Miles said nothing, but I could sense him cataloguing each word for future reference.
I kept going, not for drama, but because every second that passed was another chance for Carolyn to reroute her story. “We also know you manufactured the Vegas incident. That you had the ring already, made sure we had more than our fair share of alcohol, and arranged that scene in your hotel room.”
Still nothing. No anger, no denial, just the smooth neutrality of a surgeon prepping for an amputation.
Jude spoke, finally. “You can stop pretending you’re the victim now,” he said, voice so quiet I almost missed it.
Carolyn smiled at him, a smile I had seen used to vaporize stronger men, and said, “You never really knew how this worked, did you?”
I wanted to interrupt, but I forced myself to let her play her hand.
She turned to me, gaze as direct as a knife point.
“You were never going to choose me,” she said, so matter-of-fact it almost sounded clinical.
“I knew it from the engagement dinner. I knew it when you spent the night talking with him instead of with your new fiancée.” She nodded at Jude, then at Miles, who for a moment looked almost apologetic.
“You all think this is a soap opera, or a game, but some of us actually care about not ending up on the curb.”
Vance put a hand on her arm, a gentle pressure that Carolyn shook off instantly.
“I did what I had to do,” she said, voice rising.
“I’m not going to apologize for protecting myself.
You can talk all you want about the timeline, the legal this and the emotional that, but none of it would have mattered if you’d just—” She stopped herself, but only for a heartbeat.
“If you’d just done what everyone expected. ”
I let the quiet stretch, then said, “You had the deal with Pryce before any of this started. Before Las Vegas. Before the engagement dinner. Before we were even dating.”
Her smile was gone now, replaced by the taut, brittle mask of someone who knows the end is coming but refuses to blink.
I pressed. “So how did I take your perfect life away from you when you sold it to Aldous Pryce before we even got engaged?”
That did it.
For a moment, she did not speak. The rage in her face was so old and so pure it was almost beautiful. She rose, stepped around the coffee table, and faced me across the span of glass and air.
“You want to know what I lost?” she said.
“You want to know what I gave up for this?” She jabbed a finger at me, then at Jude.
“I watched you, my whole life. Jude—this is a man who never once in his life took anything seriously, who coasted on my shadow and my family and the one time he has to make a decision, he fucks my fiancé and expects the world to line up and clap for him.”
She was shaking now, not with anger, but with something closer to grief.
“You took everything I ever wanted, Jude. You always do. You never even know you’re doing it. You don’t have to care about anyone else because everyone is always picking up your slack. And then, for the first time, I’m in a position to get something, and you can’t even let me have that.”
Jude did not move. He was still as a corpse, eyes fixed on a spot somewhere past her left ear. He said, “You were never in love with him. You just wanted to win. You built this to fail, and you know it.”
The words landed like a slap, and for a moment she looked genuinely wounded.
But the pain twisted, and her face darkened.
She reached for the heavy paperweight on the side table—a three-pound chunk of cut crystal with Carolyn’s initials etched in gold.
I saw it coming a half-second before she launched it, hard and true, at Jude’s head.
I moved. Years of training, decades of not letting bad things happen to good people, whatever it was, I got there first. The edge of the glass caught me on the outside of the forearm, a sharp snap of bone against bone, and skidded across the hardwood, spinning into the wall with a sound that would have made a less expensive drywall crack.
For a second, everyone froze. Then Carolyn was coming at Jude again, not with a weapon, but with her hands, nails out and eyes wild. Vance was on her feet, shouting “Stop—Carolyn, stop!” but Carolyn was not listening.
Jude did not move. He let her close the distance, and only when she was within a foot did he speak. “This is over, Caro,” he said, using the nickname that had always belonged to childhood, not this. “It’s over. Let it go.”
I stepped between them, not gently, one hand up to keep Jude behind me. “Enough,” I said, and the sound of it filled the apartment. “Whatever you wanted to happen here, it’s not going to.”
Behind me, I heard Miles’s voice, calm and official, as he dialed out. “This is attorney Miles Cranston. I’m on site at—” He rattled off the address, then finished with: “There’s been an assault. No immediate medical need, but you’ll want to send a patrol.”
Carolyn stopped. Just stopped. She stood there, chest heaving, mascara leaking down her face in two precise tracks, and for the first time since I’d met her she looked neither beautiful nor dangerous, just wrecked.
A woman standing in the debris of something she built badly and blaming everyone in the room for not holding it up.
Then, slowly, the expression closed off again into something cold and exhausted. She looked at the floor, then at Vance, who was standing stiffly with her hands at her sides.
Vance spoke, her voice soft and final. “I can no longer represent you,” she said, and then to Miles, “I’ll stay until the police arrive.”