Chapter Forty-Two: Running Out

Ivy kept Grace Odom's statement in the inside pocket of her jacket for three days, and every time she reached for it, her nerve failed her by a slightly different margin.

The first day, she told herself she needed the right moment, an evening when the house was quiet and Damien wasn't distracted by board business. The second day, she told herself she needed to reread the statement once more, to be sure it said exactly what she remembered it saying. By the third day, she understood, with a clarity that frightened her, that she was no longer looking for the right moment. She was simply afraid, and dressing the fear up as preparation.

Priya found her on the third evening, sitting in the study with the statement spread open on the desk, untouched coffee gone cold beside her.

"You have it," Priya said, not a question, glancing at the paper. "You've had it for days."

"I keep almost doing it," Ivy admitted. "I get as far as finding him, and then something in me just locks."

"You don't have the luxury of locking anymore," Priya said, gentler than the words themselves. "I got a call an hour ago. Marcus requested time on the board's calendar. Closed session, no agenda listed. That's not how he usually operates. He files agendas. He likes people to see exactly how prepared he is."

Ivy's stomach dropped. "When."

"Four days from now. I don't know what he's planning. I don't know if it's this, specifically, or something else entirely. But I know a man clearing his calendar quietly usually isn't doing it for good news."

Ivy sat with that for a long moment, the four days collapsing whatever fragile margin she had allowed herself down to almost nothing.

"I keep thinking about how to say it," she admitted. "I've rehearsed it a hundred different ways. Gentle. Direct. Starting with the evidence. Starting with an apology. None of them feel like enough. None of them feel like they'll actually prepare him for what's coming."

"There isn't a version that prepares him," Priya said. "I don't think that exists. You're not just telling him his mother did something terrible. You're telling him you've known for months and chose, every single day, not to say it. Both of those things are going to hurt him. You can't soften the second one by perfecting the delivery of the first."

"That's not comforting."

"It's not meant to be," Priya said. "It's meant to stop you waiting for a version of this conversation that doesn't cost you anything. That version isn't coming, Ivy. It was never going to."

She thought, after Priya left, about her father again, the way she always did when a decision felt too large to hold steady on her own. She thought about the settlement Grace had described, the quiet exchange, silence for survival, and understood, with a fresh ache, that she was standing at the edge of the exact same choice her father had once faced. Protect herself, protect the people she loved, by staying quiet. Or tell the truth and accept whatever it cost.

He had chosen silence, in the end, and she understood now, better than she ever had, why. He had been protecting a family he could not afford to lose any further. She was protecting a man she was terrified of losing entirely. The shapes were different. The fear underneath them was not.

But her father had also spent the rest of his life carrying the weight of that silence, had let his own daughter believe, for three years, that he had failed at the one thing he cared about most. She thought of the specific loneliness in that, dying with a truth nobody else was allowed to know, and found, sitting alone in the study with his memory pressing close, that she did not want that particular inheritance. She did not want to hand Damien a version of herself that had chosen comfort over honesty and called it love.

She pulled out her phone and began, haltingly, to write out what she wanted to say, not a script exactly, more a set of anchors she could hold onto if her nerve started to fail her partway through. She wrote his mother's name. She wrote her father's name. She wrote the word sorry, deleted it, wrote it again, because it belonged there even if it wasn't enough. She read the three lines back and felt how inadequate they were against the size of everything they were meant to carry, and understood that no amount of preparation was going to make this feel survivable. It was only going to make it possible.

She stood, finally, the statement still in her hand, and walked as far as the study door before her phone buzzed sharply against the desk behind her, cutting through the moment like a struck match.

A text from Priya. Marcus's closed session just got moved up. Two days, not four. I'm sorry, I know your timing.

Ivy stood frozen in the doorway, the two days rearranging everything she had just steadied herself to do. Telling Damien tonight, unplanned, breathless, in the middle of a workday, felt suddenly too fragile for what the moment actually required. He deserved better than a confession delivered in a panic because a calendar had shifted. She deserved, if she was honest, one more night to find the right words instead of whatever raw, frightened version would come out of her if she walked into his office in the next five minutes.

She sat back down at the desk instead, her hands unsteady, and made herself a promise she intended, this time, to actually keep.

Two days. Before Marcus's session, before he could shape the story his own way. She would tell Damien herself, on her own terms, with the whole truth laid out properly instead of stammered out under pressure.

She folded Grace's statement carefully and slid it back into her jacket pocket, over her heart, where it had lived for days now like something both a weapon and a wound, and told herself that two days was enough. It had to be enough. She was fast running out of anything else to tell herself instead.

Down the hall, unaware, Damien worked late into the night on a presentation meant to shore up exactly the kind of board confidence Marcus was now quietly working to dismantle from the opposite direction. Ivy sat with her phone in her hand for a long time, watching the light spill from beneath his office door, and did not go to him that night. Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she would find the words, and the courage, and give him both at once, before anyone else in this house had the chance to take that choice away from her first.