Chapter 262 I told him the Truth

Chapter 262 I told him the Truth
Chapter Two Hundred And Sixty

Lucian was parked outside.

He had said he would not come. She had told him she needed to do this alone and he had looked at her with the expression that meant he understood and respected the distinction and was going to wait outside in the car regardless.

She saw the car and felt something move through her that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sob but lived in the territory adjacent to both.

She walked to the car.

He got out when he saw her coming, which was unnecessary and which he did anyway.

She reached him and stopped.

He looked at her face.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She thought about the question.

She thought about what “all right” meant at the end of something that had spanned two lifetimes and had involved grief and loss and reincarnation and corporate warfare and love found twice in the same person and justice arrived at through the most circuitous possible route.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I am.”

He looked at her for a moment.

Then he opened the car door.

She got in.

He went around and got in beside her and the car moved into the Crestmont afternoon and the city went on around them in its continuous, indifferent way.

She looked out the window.

She thought about Vera, who was in a different facility on the other side of the city, serving her own time for her own choices.

She thought about Kurt in the visiting room.

She thought about Nathan in the hospital, and Adam’s trial, which was proceeding through the courts with the methodical efficiency of a well-evidenced case.

She thought about the Vaughn Empire building with her name on the documentation in Cornelius Webb’s files.

She thought about the Beaumont Empire, which was stable and performing and which Isabella had built from modest foundations with the same focused capability that her daughter had inherited.

She thought about Lucian beside her.

“Lucian,” she said.

“Yes.”

“He asked how I knew the code,” she said.

A pause.

“What did you tell him?” Lucian asked.

“The truth,” she said.

He was quiet for a moment.

“How did he take it?” he asked.

“About as well as you would expect,” she said.

Another pause.

“Are you done with him?” he asked. Not jealously. With the genuine inquiry of a man who wanted to know if the door was properly closed.

She looked out the window at Crestmont going past, at the city she had built two lives in, at the towers and the streets and the ordinary extraordinary life of a place that did not pause for anyone’s story no matter how significant the story was.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m done.”

He reached across and took her hand.

She held on to it like her life depended on it.



Crestmont in spring was a different city from Crestmont in any other season.

It had something to do with the river, which changed colour in spring, and something to do with the trees along the financial district’s main boulevard, which produced blossoms in a shade of pink that was almost excessive in its determination to be noticed, and something to do with the particular quality of the light, which was warmer and more generous than the light of the preceding months and treated the city’s glass towers with a kindness they did not always deserve.

Aria noticed all of this from the window of the Vaughn Empire’s chairman’s office on the fourteenth floor.

It was a Thursday morning.

She had meetings at nine and eleven and a board call at two and a site review for the Rainbow Corridor project at four, which was on schedule and performing ahead of revised projections and had become, in the months since the contract’s dramatic conclusion, something of a landmark project in Crestmont’s infrastructure sector.

She had a coffee on her desk that was exactly the right temperature.

She had learned, in the months since taking the chairmanship, that the Vaughn Empire’s administrative staff were exceptionally good at exactly the right temperature, which was one of the pleasures of coming home to something you had built.

She was reading through the morning’s briefing documents when her phone lit up.

Lucian.

She smiled before she answered.

“Good morning,” she said.

“The Caldwell filing came through,” he said, without preamble, because he was Lucian and preamble was not a thing he generally engaged with. “The acquisition is confirmed.”

“Good,” she said. “I told you the timing was right.”

“You told me the timing was acceptable,” he said. “I upgraded it to right after I reviewed the secondary figures.”

“That is the same thing,” she said.

“It is not the same thing,” he said.

She smiled.

This was a version of a conversation they had approximately four times a week, in various forms, across various subject matters, and she found it consistently one of the better parts of her day.

“Dinner tonight?” he asked.

“The Graves dinner is at eight,” she said. “Your father’s birthday.”

“Before that,” he said.

“I have the site review at four,” she said.

“I’ll meet you at the site,” he said. “We can go directly.”

“You want to come to a construction site in your good suit,” she said.

“I want to see what forty percent ahead of projection looks like in person,” he said. “The suit is secondary.”

She laughed.

She did not laugh often, in the way of a woman who kept her real laughter for things that genuinely earned it, and the sound of it in the quiet of her office was something she had come to recognize as a measure of how far she had come from the person she had been on that road in a car with a stranger telling her she was being taken to the slaughterhouse.

“All right,” she said. “Four o’clock. Wear something you don’t mind getting concrete dust on.”

“I will wear whatever I wear,” he said.

“That’s what I thought,” she chuckled slightly.

She ended the call and set her phone down and turned back to the window.