Chapter 3
I gave him three seconds. I counted them. I was not being dramatic about it. I was genuinely giving him the time it should take a person to locate whatever they needed to locate in order to speak on behalf of their own child in their own hotel at their own event. Three seconds is enough time. It turned out not to be enough for Richard Halston.
I turned and walked out.
No scene. No tears. No raised voice. My heels on the cream marble floor were the only sound that followed me to the lobby, and I did not look back at the ballroom doors, and I did not stop walking until I reached the brass clock my mother had chosen twenty-two years earlier because she believed a hotel lobby should tell you the time without making you feel hurried.
I stopped there and I opened my phone.
Elliot Marsh picked up on the second ring. "Mara."
"Elliot," I said. My voice was steady in the way that voices go steady when the decision has already been made and the only thing left is the execution. "Execute the trust transfer tonight."
A pause. Not a long one. Elliot had been waiting for this call for three weeks, since my twenty-eighth birthday, and I think some part of him had understood when I asked him to hold on that holding on was not going to be permanent. "Are you sure?" he said. Not because he doubted me, but because he was a careful man and careful men confirm.
I looked back through the glass doors at the ballroom. Celeste was already laughing again, turned back toward the mayor's wife, her posture carrying the specific ease of a woman who has resolved a situation and moved on from it. My father was beside her. He had not moved to the door. He had not followed me to the lobby. He had stayed where he was.
"Yes," I said. "Move the hotel, the land parcel, and the operating reserves."
"The full twenty-four million?"
May you like
"All of it."
I had been the legal beneficiary since the morning of my twenty-eighth birthday three weeks earlier, and I had done nothing with it because I had been trying to find a version of the future that did not require me to use what my mother had left me as a weapon. I had been willing to let my father keep managing the hotel. I had been willing to continue attending these events as a member of the family, not as the owner, because the distinction had seemed unimportant when the alternative was a confrontation that would end whatever remained of my relationship with my father. I had been willing to be patient and generous and to extend the kind of grace that my mother would have extended, because extending it felt like honoring her.
