Zara set the envelope on her desk without a word.
The stationery was cream, heavy, the kind that cost money.
Nathan Drake, Attorney at Law printed in the upper left corner in clean serif type.
Lily looked at her.
“What’s this?”
“I didn’t open it”.
Lily opened it, read it and folded it in thirds and dropped it in the bin beside her desk without putting it down first.
“That was fast,” Zara said.
“He wants a meeting.” Lily pulled up the vendor spreadsheet she had been working on before the interruption.
“The answer is no.”
“Lily…,”
“I said no, Zara.” She did not look up from the screen.
“Next.”.
Zara picked up her clipboard and left without pushing it, because she knew when to push and when to let something sit, which was one of the many reasons Lily had kept her for three years.
The studio was busy around her, two staff members prepping mood boards for the Harrington wedding, the phone ringing at the front desk, the low, productive noise of a company that had things to do.
Lily kept her eyes on the spreadsheet.
She kept her breathing even.
‘Ethan you can send a hundred letters through Nathan.’ She thought as she typed a figure into a cell.
‘The answer is going to be the same every time.
You stood at her glass door yesterday and asked for five minutes forgetting I asked for five minutes then’.
She laughed hysterically at the thought of that.
She does not have anything for Ethan Sinclair.
Not five minutes, not a phone call, not a meeting in Nathan’s office with everyone in their best professional expressions.
Nothing.
Two hours later, Zara came with a different envelope but this time, it was thicker.
The return address was a law firm she didn’t recognise, not Nathan’s office.
She opened it at her desk and read the header.
Her brows were creased.
‘In the matter of grandparental access rights to one Theodore Chen, age three…,’
Her eyes moved down the page.
Fast.
Her brain was already three lines ahead, already pulling out the words that mattered, already assembling the shape of what this was.
And then his name was on the second paragraph.
Ethan James Sinclair, co-petitioner.
She put the papers down flat on her desk.
Both palms pressed against them.
‘Nonsense.’ She thought.
She looked at her office wall, the framed magazine feature, the LChen logo, the mood board for the Morrison wedding, and she looked at all of it and did not see any of it.
Zara was watching her face but did not speak.
“Cancel the Sinclair Corp meeting on Thursday,” Lily said.
“Lily, that’s a sixty thousand dollar…,”
“Cancel it.” Her voice was completely level.
“Cancel every Sinclair Corp meeting on the books.
All of them.”
She stood up and went to the window.
She looked at the street below, taxis, a delivery truck, a woman pushing a stroller, the ordinary machinery of a city that did not care what was happening on the fourth floor of this building.
She pressed two fingers against the cold glass.
‘His name.’ She thought as she watched a cab change lanes.
‘His name on papers about my son.
A child he did not know existed until four days ago and his name is already on a legal filing.’
She picked up her laptop and opened a new browser tab.
Flight search.
New York to Chicago.
One way.
She looked at departure times.
******
On the other side of the city, in the drawing room of Margaret Sinclair’s house, the tea was poured and nobody was comfortable.
Vivian had come through the back entrance the way she always came, the garden gate, the side door, the housekeeper who had been with Margaret for twenty years and asked no questions.
She sat across from Margaret in the chair that had always been her chair in this room, and Margaret’s hands were steady on the teacup and her eyes were doing something her hands were working hard to contradict.
“He came home at 3AM,” Vivian said.
“He knows about the frame.
He said Lily was set up.”
“I know.” Margaret’s voice was even.
“He called me.”
“What did you say?”
“I said nothing.
I hung up.”
Vivian sat with that for a moment.
She turned her cup on the saucer once.
“Does he know about me?”
“He didn’t ask about you.
The file he has…,” Margaret paused.
Something moved behind her eyes.
“It appears to only have my name connected to the burner phone.
Not yours.”
Vivian let out was small and controlled breath.
“Good.”
“Vivian.” Margaret set her cup down.
Her saucer was perfectly centred on the tray and her spine was perfectly straight and her eyes, for the first time in the years Vivian had known her, were not steady.
“Be careful.
He is not going to stop at what Nathan gave him.
You know how he is when he starts pulling at something.”
“I’ll handle it.” Vivian nodded.
“I’m not asking you to handle it.
I’m asking you to be careful.
Those are different things.”
Vivian looked at her.
“I’ll handle it, Margaret.”
She left through the garden gate.
Margaret sat alone in her drawing room and poured a second cup she did not drink and looked at the window and thought about a file in Nathan Drake’s office with her name at the bottom of the last page, and for the first time since she had set all of this in motion, she thought about cost.
*****
Lily was looking at a seven forty-five AM departure when the office door opened.
She looked up expecting Zara because had left recently.
It was not Zara.
The woman in the doorway was smaller than Lily remembered, dressed in a coat that was slightly too big, with the look of someone who has been working up the courage to be in a specific place for longer than the journey took.
Three years smaller.
Three years more tired.
Lily’s hands went still on the keyboard.
“Claire.”
“Lily!”
“What are you doing here?” Lily asked.
Claire Sinclair, Ethan’s younger sister.
She had been abroad for a very long time and had returned for sometime to discover that Ethan had divorced her.
The last time Lily has seen her was in the first year of her marriage.
She closed the office door behind her.
“I’m so sorry about what happened”.
“It’s alright”.
“That d*ckhead”.
Claire said, irritatedly.
She crossed to the desk and put a document down on top of the laptop before either of them found words.
It was the grandparental rights filing.
The same papers Lily had been holding an hour ago.
But there was a page at the back that had not been in Lily’s copy, a separate sheet, an authorisation page, a signature at the bottom.
Lily looked at it for a long time.
The signature was Ethan’s name.
Or it was shaped like Ethan’s name.
But she had seen Ethan’s signature on fourteen pages of divorce papers three years ago and she had read every one of them and she knew what his pen did on the letter E and what it did on the final n and what was on this page was not that.
Close.
Careful.
But not that.
“He didn’t file those papers,” Claire said.
Her voice was lower than Lily remembered it, worn in the way voices get when someone has been carrying something heavy for a long time.
“And I can prove it.
But you need to listen to me first.”
Lily looked up from the page.
She looked at her face, the guilt in it, the urgency, and underneath both of those, the specific exhaustion of a woman who has been waiting too long to say something true.
“Who forged it?”
Claire sat down across from her.
She put her hands f
lat on her knees.
She looked at Lily.
“His name is Richard Sinclair, my dad,” she said.
“And he is not finished.”