Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
SEBASTIAN
The bed's cold when I wake.
For one irrational second, my hand moves across the sheets before my mind catches up with the rest of me.
Empty. Of course it is. Chloe's not beside me.
She's not in this house. She's not wearing my ring, sleeping with her cheek turned toward my pillow, trusting that I'll be there when she opens her eyes.
But this morning, the emptiness is different.
Last night was not forgiveness. I know that.
I'm not stupid enough, or arrogant enough, to mistake her body in my arms for her heart returning safely to mine.
Chloe cried afterward. She told me her heart was still broken.
She told me she's not coming home because we touched each other like people who still knew exactly how to ruin and save each other in the same breath.
Still, she let me in. Not all the way. Not the way I once had before I treated access to her like a certainty, but enough. It's enough to give me the one thing I have no right to ask for and no intention of wasting: a chance.
I sit up, the sheet sliding to my waist, and stare at the chair where my jacket hangs. It's the same jacket she fisted in both hands when she kissed me in that small upstairs lounge, and the same jacket I buttoned wrong when I left her there because she asked me to go first.
I did. That shouldn't feel like an achievement. A man leaving when his wife asks for space is not heroism. It's basic decency, and the fact that I have to learn it now, in the wreckage of our marriage, sits in my gut like old shame.
My phone's on the nightstand. There are seven unread messages from my mother. I don't open them. There is one from Oliver asking whether I want morning press clips. I don't open that either.
For once, the world can wait its turn.
I get out of bed and walk into the bathroom. My reflection looks back at me from above the sink: tired eyes, bruised mouth, stubble, and the faint red mark near my collar where Chloe’s fingers held on too tightly. I touch it once, then let my hand fall.
Last night, she asked me for proof. Not in those words. Chloe's never been a woman who begs for evidence. She stands there with all her pain in her eyes and makes you understand that words are no longer a currency she trusts.
So I set a deadline in the shower, under water hot enough to sting.
I won't ask her to come home again until I know what home has become.
I won't ask her to believe me until I can place truth in front of her, clean and documented, and stop expecting her to navigate a maze built by people with prettier smiles and sharper knives.
I won't let my mother, Katrina, or anyone else turn my wife’s pain into another problem to be handled quietly.
I've done quiet. Quiet is how Chloe ended up alone.
By eight fifteen, I'm in Albert Leneve’s office.
He's not redecorated in twenty years. The shelves are dark wood, the furniture expensive in the old way. My father used to say Albert’s office was where reckless men came to discover consequences had paperwork.
I used to think that was funny.
Albert stands when I enter. He's in his late sixties now, silver hair combed back, spine still straight enough to shame men half his age. He gives me one measured look and doesn't ask if I slept.
“Sebastian.”
“Albert.”
A woman rises from the chair near the window.
Marisa Jackson is lean, compact, and expressionless in a way that makes me immediately trust her more than almost everyone currently attached to Austen Parks.
I retained her quietly after security traced the access code Katrina used at my house back to one issued to my mother.
“Ms. Jackson,” I say.
“Mr. Austen.”
Her handshake is firm, brief, and dry. No performance. No deference. Good.
Albert gestures toward the conference table, where three folders are already laid out. “I understand you want to widen the scope.”
“I want the truth. Everything. Katrina’s suite.
The photos. The footage outside her door.
The way she got into my house. The beach pictures.
The pregnancy rumor. My mother’s involvement.
I want to know who built this, who funded it, who coordinated it, who benefited from it, and what can be proven. ”
She slides a document toward me. “The launch night.”
I look down, my mind taking a second to process the printed call sheet. There, at 9:20 p.m., is a notation that makes my jaw lock: K.H. physical beat with S.A. at main stage. Lapel/chest contact. Hold for stills.
“You’re telling me Katrina putting her hand on me was scheduled.”
“I’m telling you it was rehearsed,” Marisa says. “And the request came through a consultant Janine Austen has used before.”
My mother’s name lands without surprise, making me simply colder.
I think of Chloe standing near the stage while cameras captured Katrina’s hand over my heart, and how I stayed still just because moving away would’ve 'made a scene.
' God, what a cowardly phrase. My marriage was bleeding, and I was worried about optics.
“What else?” I ask.
“The photographers outside Katrina’s suite were tipped,” Marisa continues, sliding over a second folder. “So were the gossip accounts that posted the beach photographs with the fake baby bump. We traced the funding back to a shell entity tied to your family’s trust.”
Chloe saw that. She looked at a staged image of another woman carrying a fake child and had to wonder if I’d put our grief into someone else’s future.
A choked sound leaves me before I can stop it. I stand and walk to the window, staring out at the city's obscene normalcy.
“My wife believed her body failed me,” I say to the glass. “She believed that because I let too many silences sit between us, and now someone's used that wound as a marketing strategy. No more partial answers. If my mother did this, I want it airtight.”
When I return to the table, Albert opens a final document, a copy of the trust structure my father amended before his death. He taps a specific paragraph.
“Conduct and loyalty,” Albert says. “Any officer or family representative can be stripped of authority if they act in a manner materially adverse to the welfare or reputation of a named family member.”
I read the dry, legal words. They are a blade. “My father wrote this because of her.”
“He never trusted Janine’s hunger,” Albert says quietly. “We can remove her, Sebastian, but we'll need precision. Janine won't go quietly.”
“My mother's never done anything quietly unless silence served her.”
Albert’s eyes hold mine, heavy with the weight of what we're about to do. “This is your mother.”
The room goes dead silent. I think of Janine erasing Chloe from photographs, dismissing her ideas, and letting Katrina into my house. I think of her voice saying Chloe couldn't give me what I needed, treating my wife’s tragic losses like a defect to be itemized.
“No,” I say, and something shatters cleanly in my chest. “Chloe is my wife.”
Albert lowers his gaze for a brief second, a sudden look of profound recognition crossing his face. “Then I'll build the case.”
“Build all of it.”
Albert gathers the folders, the dance of getting ready to rise and get to work. Marisa doesn't move.
I've spent too many years in rooms where people hesitate before telling me the thing that matters. Executives soften bad numbers, PR teams disguise scandals as challenges, and my mother pauses before she slides a knife between someone’s ribs and calls it concern.
Marisa’s hesitation is different. It's careful, almost reluctant.
“What?” I ask.
“I don’t have enough yet.”
My skin tightens. “Say what you have.”
She looks to Albert, then back to me. “There’s a pattern in the dates I want to run down before I put it in front of you as anything more than a question.”
“What dates?”
“LLC activity, payments, and certain private vendor invoices.” She pauses. “One vendor in particular appears in proximity to several family events.”
“What kind of vendor?”
Her expression doesn't change, but her voice gentles by a degree. “Medical-adjacent. Private wellness. I’m not prepared to speculate.”
The room narrows. Medical. Private wellness. Dates.
For a second, I can't hear anything but Chloe’s voice in the old donor lounge: If I go back, I need to know I won't end up in that house again with your mother looking at me like I'm something that got tracked in on her floor.
My hand flattens over the table. Albert says my name, low, but I don't look at him.
“What dates?” I ask again.
Marisa’s eyes are steady. “I need forty-eight hours.”
“No.”
“Mr. Austen?—”
“I said no because you don't get forty-eight hours if someone's destroying evidence while we sit here being cautious.”
“I’m already preserving what I can,” she says. “But if I give you a theory before I have documents, you may act on it.”
I almost tell her she has no idea what I can act on. Then I stop.
Last night, Chloe asked me to prove it with what I do. She didn't ask for rage, noise, or a beautiful display that burns hot and leaves her standing in ash again. She asked for proof.
“Fine,” I say, and the word costs me. “You get documents. Not guesses.”
Marisa nods. “That’s why I hesitated.”
“But listen to me very carefully.” My voice is quiet now, which is usually when people start paying attention.
“If there is something here, if my mother used family money, company access, medical vendors, private contractors, or anything else to harm my wife, I want every inch of it. I want names, dates, invoices, messages, bank routes, deleted files, assistants, doctors, consultants, and drivers. I want the person who ordered it and the person who carried it out.”
Marisa doesn't blink. “Whatever it costs?”
The question should be rhetorical, but it's not. There's a bill coming, and I can feel it before I see the number. It may cost me my family name as I understood it, my mother, the company’s clean public face, my father’s ghost, and the last comfortable lie I had left.
Good. Comfort has made me useless.
“Whatever it costs,” I say.
Albert studies me across the table. “And Chloe?”
Her name moves through the room and changes the air.
I see her as she was last night, fixing her dress with shaking hands, telling me no when I asked to walk her down.
I see the woman onstage, grief and fury pouring out of her under the lights while the audience rose to its feet.
I see the girl in the Princess Tessa dress I fell in love with because she knelt for a crying child like kindness was not a performance but a calling.
“I don’t tell her until I know what I’m telling her,” I say. “And when I do, it comes from me first. Not a headline, not a lawyer, and not another ambush.”
Albert nods once. “Good.”
I gather the copies Marisa allows me to keep. It's not all of them, but it's enough to feel the outline of the thing taking shape.
I step into the hall with my father’s clause in one folder, my mother’s fingerprints in another, and the first clean edge of fear cutting through me. It's not fear of losing my wife; I've already done that. It's fear of what I'll find when I finally stop looking away.