Chapter 13 - The Inheritance of Cinders
Arlo stopped dead at the bottom of the porch steps. His eyes, rheumy and rimmed with red, searched my face for a crack in the granite wall I had built around myself. He found nothing. No tears. No hesitation. Just the absolute, terrifying void of a woman who had already died once and had nothing left to lose.
"You're going to ruin us," he whispered, his voice cracking with a pathetic, childlike disbelief. "Everything we built... the estate in McLean, the beach house in Nags Head, the art collection... it’s all gone. The federal government seized the accounts this morning. They even took the Mercedes."
"Good," I replied evenly. "It was bought with money stolen from schoolteachers and construction workers whose pensions your firm gutted in twenty-eighteen. You didn't build an empire, Arlo. You built a house of cards on top of a mass grave."
"Claire!"
Tiffany had finally emerged from the car, slamming the Mercedes door with a force that rattled the windows of the cottage. She was wearing a white Chanel tweed jacket that was already stained with mud at the hem, her blonde hair tangled around her face like a cheap wig. Her eyes were wide, manic, and swimming with hysterical tears.
"You did this!" she screamed, pointing a trembling, diamond-encrusted finger at my chest as she stormed up the walkway. "You bitter, miserable cow! Because you lost your boring husband and your snotty kids, you had to drag the rest of us down with you! You couldn't just let us live our lives? You had to play detective?"
I didn't flinch. I didn't raise my voice. I simply waited until she reached the bottom of the stairs, standing chest-to-chest with me, her breath smelling of stale espresso and cheap chardonnay.
"Tiffany," I said softly, "how much did that jacket cost? Five thousand? Six?"
She blinked, thrown off balance by the bizarre non-sequitur. "What? That’s none of your—"
"And the earrings? Three carats each? Imported from Antwerp?" I tilted my head, looking her up and down with clinical detachment. "Did you know that every single stitch of clothing you are wearing right now was paid for by the quarterly dividend of a college fund belonging to a four-year-old girl named Lily Sinclair? Every time you ordered a bottle of Dom Pérignon at a Richmond nightclub, you were literally drinking my daughter's college education."
Tiffany opened her mouth to scream another insult, but the words died in her throat. The sheer, naked reality of it—stripped of the designer labels and the country club PR—hit her like a splash of ice water.
"You're a monster," she whimpered, her hands dropping to her sides. "You're a cold-blooded monster."
"No, Tiffany," I said, turning my back on her and resting my hand on the doorknob. "I'm just the auditor. And the audit is closed."
"Wait!" Arlo lunged forward, his fingers catching the edge of my door as I began to push it shut. "Claire, please! We don't have a place to sleep. The bank foreclosed on the McLean house this morning. We have nowhere to go. Just... just let us use the guest house in the back. For a few days. Until we can sort things out with our attorneys."
I looked down at my father’s trembling hand—the hand that had held mine when I took my first steps, now shaking with the terror of absolute destitution. A microscopic fraction of pity flickered in my chest, a ghost of the daughter I used to be.
Then I closed my eyes and saw Ethan’s face in the hospital morgue, pale and still. I felt the cold weight of the peridot birthstone against my collarbone.
I reached out and slowly, deliberately, peeled my father’s fingers off the wood of the door.
May you like
"There is no guest house, Arlo," I said quietly. "I sold this property to the state forest service three months ago. I'm moving to Seattle on Monday."
Before he could answer, I pushed the heavy oak door shut and turned the deadbolt with a loud, final *click*.
