Inheritance

 

POV: Chase Sterling

---

The Sterling family attorney is a man named Gerald Foss, who has been handling this family's affairs for thirty-one years and has the carefully neutral expression of someone who has witnessed enough Sterling drama to have developed a professional immunity to all of it. He sits at the head of the conference table in the forty-second floor offices of Sterling Industries with a leather portfolio open in front of him and his hands folded on top of it, and he does not look at me when I walk in, which tells me he already knows exactly what this morning contains and has decided in advance not to be the one who makes eye contact when it happens.

Dominic is already seated.

He doesn't look up either, which is vintage Dominic, which means we are all going to sit in this room together and pretend that the last seventy-two hours didn't happen, which is also vintage Dominic, which is maybe the most Sterling thing I've ever witnessed in my life.

I take the chair across from him. The table between us is long enough that we could be in separate rooms. That feels intentional.

"Chase," Gerald says.

"Let's get on with it," I say.

Gerald gets on with it.

---

The reading of the will takes forty-seven minutes. I know because I watch the clock on the wall above Gerald's head for the entire duration, a habit I developed in boarding school when the only way to survive a lecture was to know exactly how much longer you had to endure it.

There is a lot of money. More than I knew. The holdings are more complex than Dominic ever let on, which is also vintage Dominic, because information is a form of control and he has been controlling me since I was five years old and apparently saw no reason to stop just because I was twenty-two and had earned a degree and been living independently for four years.

I sign where Gerald indicates. I initial where he indicates. I do not look at Dominic.

Dominic does not look at me.

We are excellent at this.

When it is finished, Gerald closes his portfolio and clasps his hands and says, in the tone of someone performing a ritual they have performed many times before, "As of this morning, Mr. Chase Sterling is the sole heir and primary officer of the Sterling Group, with full authority over all holdings, investments, and corporate entities as enumerated in the preceding documentation."

There is a pause.

I wait for something to feel different.

It does, but not the way I expected.

---

The headache starts while Gerald is still talking.

Not a gradual thing, not the kind that builds from behind the eyes and gives you fair warning. This comes in like a tide going out in reverse, like pressure building from nowhere, like something inside my chest deciding to rearrange itself without asking permission. I keep my expression neutral, which is something I am very good at, but my hands go flat on the table in front of me and I focus on the grain of the wood to keep the room from tilting.

And then the cold.

It doesn't make any sense. The room is climate-controlled, forty-two floors up, mid-June, the sun coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the angle that usually makes this conference room uncomfortably warm by ten in the morning. But the cold comes anyway, settling around my shoulders and down the back of my neck like someone has opened a window in winter, like something is pressing against me from the outside.

Gerald is still talking. I hear his voice as if from a moderate distance.

Dominic looks at me across the table for the first time since I sat down. His expression is the same as it always is, which is to say it is very nearly nothing, but something moves behind his eyes that I have never seen there before. Something that looks, briefly and impossibly, like pity.

He looks away before I can be sure.

I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth and wait for whatever this is to pass.

It doesn't pass. It settles. It gets comfortable. It starts to feel, in the most deeply unsettling way, like something that belongs to me.

---

I sign the last document at 10:47 a.m.

Dominic stands, buttoning his jacket. He looks at me for a moment, and I wait for him to say something, because there is always something, because in thirty-five years he has never passed up an opportunity to instruct me in exactly how I am falling short of the standard.

"Don't embarrass this family," he says.

Then he walks out.

I sit at the long table alone for a while after that, listening to the building hum around me, feeling the cold that hasn't left my shoulders since the papers were signed, and I think about the ring in my jacket pocket that I still haven't thrown away, which I know I should have done three days ago, which I know I am going to have to deal with eventually.

Not yet.

---

The Sterling penthouse is fifty floors up in a building Dominic bought in 2009 and renovated to his own precise and inhospitable specifications, which means it is all glass and white marble and clean lines and exactly one piece of art per wall, and it has always felt less like a home than like a very expensive version of the boarding school dormitory I lived in at thirteen. I grew up here in the school year. I know every room. I have never once felt comfortable in any of them.

I've been staying here since I came back from LA, which is something I haven't examined too closely. I told myself it was practical. It is not practical.

I go through the rooms with a glass of Macallan and nothing specific in mind, which is how I know I have a specific destination.

The guest suite in the east wing still has my things from college packed in the corner, boxes I brought back from the Columbia apartment three days ago when I cleared out before the lease ended. I meant to go through them properly. I haven't.

I sit down on the edge of the guest bed and look at the boxes.

Then I open the first one.

---

The ring box I put on the dresser without opening. I already know what it contains and I am not interested in looking at it right now.

The next things out are books, which are fine, neutral objects that don't require any particular feelings from me. A Macallan glass I stole from a bar junior year. My Columbia ID, which I should probably throw away but somehow haven't.

And then, at the bottom, underneath the stack of notebooks, the photographs.

There are not many. I don't take photographs as a rule. But Sienna took them, usually, at dinners or parties or ordinary Tuesday evenings in the common room, and sometimes she texted them to people and sometimes she printed them because she had a printer and thought physical photographs mattered, which is a thing I made fun of her for at the time and feel differently about now.

In the first one, Vivian is laughing at something out of frame, and she doesn't know the camera is pointed at her, and she is wearing a blue sweater that I know is cashmere because she let me feel the fabric once and explained why it mattered, and her hair is down, and her face is the face she has when she isn't performing for anyone. The face that is just hers.

I sit with it for a moment.

The cold is still around my shoulders.

I put the photograph face-down on the dresser.

I take out the next one. This one I do know, which is that Vivian and I are at a party junior year, my arm around her shoulders, her leaning into my side with her drink raised to the camera and laughing. I am looking at her instead of at the camera and my expression is not something I want to examine for very long.

I put that one face-down too.

There is a paperback at the bottom of the box, a play, the one she was reading the first night she let me stay in her room, because she had rehearsal early the next morning and she fell asleep on top of it with her glasses still on, and I stayed later than I meant to and watched her sleep and thought, against every self-preserving instinct I possessed, that I was in serious trouble.

I stole the play. I don't know why I kept it.

I stare at it for a long time.

Then I carry the box to the open fireplace in the living room, which is ornamental and has never in my memory been used for anything, and I find the matches in the kitchen drawer where Dominic keeps them for candles he doesn't own, and I light the first photograph.

It catches slowly, then all at once.

I feed the rest in, one by one. The photographs. The play. The ticket stubs from a film we saw senior year because she wanted to see it and I pretended I didn't but I did, and I still know the entire first act by heart, and I drop it in before that becomes something I have to think about further.

The ring box I almost put in. I hold it over the fire.

I don't.

I put it back in my jacket pocket instead, which means nothing, which is not a decision I am prepared to examine, and I pour another glass of Macallan and stand at the floor-to-ceiling window and look out over the city and try to identify the feeling that is currently residing behind my sternum.

I have a name for the thing she said to me, and a name for the thing he announced in that conference room this morning, and a name for the cold that started when the papers were signed and still hasn't left, and in all of the available language I have for any of it, none of it accounts for the fact that I am standing here feeling like someone I don't recognize yet, like a version of myself that was always waiting on the other side of a door I just walked through.

The city below is bright and enormous and indifferent, which I have always appreciated about it.

I take a drink and close my eyes.

---

The bathroom in the master suite has a mirror that runs the full width of one wall, which Dominic installed for reasons I've never wanted to know and which means you cannot avoid your own reflection in this room unless you turn off the lights, which I don't usually do because I am not afraid of the dark and also because I'm not eleven years old.

I put my glass down on the vanity. I look at my face.

I look like myself. This is not as reassuring as it should be.

The migraine is still there, a low pressure behind my right eye, and the cold has settled into something quieter now, more ambient, like a temperature I'll simply have to get used to. I look at my reflection for a while, taking a kind of inventory. My father's jaw. My mother's eyes. The scar above my right eyebrow from the fight at thirteen I never told anyone about. The ring on my right hand that has been there since I was eighteen and that I only just understood the origin of today when Gerald explained that it had been Dominic's before it was mine, and his father's before that.

I look at my own face in the mirror.

And my reflection smiles.

I don't smile.

The expression that crosses my reflection's face is slow and deliberate and very specific, and it is not the expression of a man standing at a bathroom vanity on a June morning feeling the weight of an empire he just inherited. It is the expression of something that has been waiting a long time and has just been told it can stop waiting.

I blink.

My face is my face again. Neutral. Still.

I look at the mirror for a long time without moving.

The cold has settled permanently into my shoulders, and the headache is still there, and the ring box is still in my jacket pocket, and the ashes in the fireplace downstairs are still warm, and somewhere on the other side of this country, Vivian Ashford is starting her new life, and I am standing here in my father's bathroom looking at my own reflection and finding, for the first time in my life, that I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at.

I pick up my drink.

I finish it.

I don't look in the mirror again.