Chapter 24 — The Phone Call

POV: BEATRIX

The call came in at ten in the morning, while I was still finishing my coffee at the kitchen counter. Ivy was already at school, and the apartment had that particular quiet it only gets in the middle of a weekday, too big for the few of us actually there.

I almost didn't answer. Seeing my mother's name on the screen usually meant bracing myself for something, a guilt trip, a demand, or some fresh performance designed to get exactly what she wanted from me.

I let it ring twice before picking up, already tired. I answered anyway, because some childhood habits never fully go away, the reflex to pick up no matter how much you've told yourself you wouldn't.

"Beatrix." Her voice cracked on my name before she'd even finished saying it. "Beatrix, please, I need your help."

This didn't sound like her usual crying. Her usual crying had a rhythm to it, practiced, building at exactly the right moments for maximum effect. This was messier. Ragged. The crying that happens when someone has actually run out of options.

I had heard my mother cry more times than I could count over the years. Real tears over small things, real fear, dressed up as something else entirely. This one didn't sound like either of those. It sounded like the bottom had actually dropped out from under her.

"What's wrong?"

"They're evicting me. Three days, Beatrix. Three days and I have nowhere to go." Her breath hitched, wet and uneven. "I know you're angry with me. I know I don't deserve this. But please, I need to talk to you for a few minutes. I have the paperwork, and I need you to see it."

Maya's voice was immediately in my head, immediately, clear as anything, from a conversation we'd had years ago after Martha last pulled something like this.

Never go alone. Never believe the crying until you've seen actual proof. She only calls when she wants something, and she'll say whatever it takes to get it.

Maya had said all that after the last time, when Martha had shown up sobbing over a medical bill that turned out to be completely made up. I had believed her then, too. I had believed her more times than I cared to admit over the years, and I had been wrong more often than I had been right.

I knew all of that. I believed it all.

"Meet me at the café," I said. "The one on Fifth. This afternoon. Alone."

"Thank you. Thank you, Beatrix. I promise, I just need to show you the papers."

"I'll see you at two," I said, then hung up before I could talk myself out of it.

I sat there for a moment afterward, staring at my reflection in the dark screen, already knowing it was a mistake.

Some part of me needed to see it for myself: the eviction notice, the desperation, whether any of it was actually real this time, or just a better performance than usual.

I told myself I was doing this for closure, one way or another. Either I would see real proof and help her, or I would see nothing and finally let myself stop expecting anything different from her ever again.

Nikolai walked into the kitchen just as I was setting my phone down.

"Who was that?" he asked, though something in his face told me he'd already heard enough of the call to guess.

"My mother. She says she's being evicted."

His jaw tightened. "And you believe her."

"I don't know. Maybe. I'm going to find out."

"Alone."

"That's what she asked for."

"And you're going to do exactly what she asks, even now, after everything."

"I'm going because if I don't and it turns out to be real, I won't be able to live with myself. Not because she asked nicely."

He didn't say anything for a long moment, studying me with an expression I couldn't quite read, somewhere between worry and something even more guarded.

****

POV: NIKOLAI

I did not like it. I want that stated plainly, if only to myself.

Everything about the phone call I'd caught the tail end of, the desperate pitch of Martha's voice, audible even from across the kitchen, set off a warning I had learned to trust over years of negotiating with people who lied for a living.

I have sat across from enough desperate men trying to save a failing business to recognize the particular pitch of genuine panic. Martha's voice, even filtered through a phone held slightly too far from Beatrix's ear, had that exact pitch. That did not make me trust the situation any more than I already didn't.

I was half tempted to send security with her, go myself, or tell her no, the way I had told Julian no outside a party lounge two weeks ago, with far less hesitation than I felt now.

Martha was not Julian. I could not simply put my hand around her throat and make the problem disappear, however satisfying that particular fantasy might have been for exactly as long as it took me to remember I was talking about my wife's mother, not an enemy.

I didn’t do any of those things.

"You don't have to go," I said. "You know that."

"I know."

"If it's a trick, you don't owe her the courtesy of finding out in person."

"I know that too." She met my eyes, steady despite everything I could see working behind her composure. "But if it's real, and I don't go, I'll spend the rest of my life wondering what I let happen to her because I was too angry to check."

I understood that logic better than I wanted to.

I had spent four years avoiding that kind of reckoning with my own family, choosing distance over the discomfort of finding out whether Arthur's threats had ever really meant anything.

Staying away had cost me nothing. It had also, I suspected, cost me the chance to ever know for certain whether I'd made the right choice.

I did not want that same regret sitting in Beatrix's chest ten years from now, wondering what might have happened if she had gone to check.

I didn’t tell her any of that. I nodded and let her go, though every instinct I’d built over years of managing risk told me this was exactly the kind of decision that came back to bite me later.

"Text me when you get there," I said. "And when you leave. Take a car, not a cab. Marcus can drop you and wait outside if you want him to."

"I'll be fine, Nikolai."

"I know. Humor me anyway."

"I will."

She kissed my cheek on her way out, quick and unthinking, the kind of gesture that had become ordinary between us without either of us ever deciding it should, and then she was gone, the door clicking shut behind her, leaving the penthouse quieter than I liked.

I left for the office soon after, for a call with Meridian's lawyers that I could not reasonably put off, and told myself the unease sitting low in my chest was only leftover worry about her mother, nothing more specific than that.

It did not work entirely. A quieter part of me kept returning to the empty apartment behind me, though I could not have said, then, exactly what it was circling toward.

****

POV: SERENA

I had been waiting nearly a week for an afternoon just like this.

Martha and I had gone over the timing twice, once by phone and once in person, to make sure her performance fell on a day when I actually had the freedom to act on whatever it produced.

Martha's little performance about the eviction had worked better than either of us had actually expected.

I watched from across the street as Beatrix left the building alone, right on schedule, hailing a cab toward Fifth Street with the particular hurried guilt of a daughter who still hadn't learned to stop rescuing people who didn't deserve it.

She looked exactly as I expected. Anxious. Distracted. Already halfway to forgiving our mother before she'd even heard the whole story.

I waited another twenty minutes after that, watching the entrance and making sure Nikolai's car had pulled away too, before I finally crossed the street myself.

The keycard was still exactly where I'd tucked it after dinner, deep in the lining of my clutch, lifted from that hallway credenza while everyone else was distracted by my mother's tears and Nikolai's little speech about respect.

Nobody even noticed me lingering there for those two seconds. I had almost forgotten I still had it, buried under receipts and old lipstick, until Martha reminded me three days ago exactly what we might be able to do with an afternoon of privacy in that penthouse and nobody around to stop us.

I held it up to the lobby reader.

It beeped green.

I rode the elevator up alone, my heart pounding in a way I refused to admit was nerves, and let myself into the penthouse with the same keycard. The door clicked open onto a quiet, empty hallway that, for the next little while at least, belonged entirely to me.

I stood there for a moment, just breathing it in, the quiet, the space, the sheer size of a life that could have been mine if things had gone even slightly differently.

Then I stepped inside and quietly pulled the door shut behind me.

I did not have long—an hour, maybe less—before someone noticed something out of place.

That was more than enough time for what I had planned.