All Chapters of The Inheritance Clause: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

POV: Avalon PierceThe federal courthouse on Golden Gate Avenue looked exactly like a building designed to make you feel small.Which was probably the point.Avalon had been inside it before. He knew the lobby, the security line, the echo the floors made when the building was quiet.But today wasn’t quiet.Reporters filed outside, not the mob that had followed the early deposition hearings but enough. A cluster near the entrance with cameras and the patient energy of people waiting for something they’d been told was worth waiting for.He walked past them without stopping.Selene was beside him, Margaret was just behind and Thomas had arrived separately, which was intentional and they both knew it.Catherine was already inside.She was sitting on a bench in the corridor outside the courtroom with her hands folded in her lap, her back straight and her face arranged in the composed expression he’d known his entire life. She looked well considering she just got discharged. She stood imme

POV: Maya CastellanoMaya packed three times.The first bag was sensible. Neutral clothes, laptop, chargers organized into their little case the way a person did when they were trying to convince themselves they were fine. She stood back and looked at it and felt absolutely nothing which was probably the answer.The second bag happened twenty minutes later and was a different person entirely.The black dress she’d bought eighteen months ago for a dinner that got cancelled and had been hanging in her wardrobe with its tags still on. The gold earrings Selene brought back from Marrakech. A novel she’d been meaning to read for two years and kept putting down. She put all of it in the bag before she understood why and then stood looking at what she’d packed and felt the discomfort of someone who had just accidentally told the truth.She took it all out.Started again at 1 AM with neither version, just enough clothes for a person going somewhere for six days.“This is ridiculous,” she told

POV: Selene CastellanoIt started with the calendar.Avalon’s phone on the kitchen counter showing a notification for a board dinner she hadn’t known about and hadn’t been asked about and was apparently expected to attend in four days.She saw it while making coffee and didn't say anything immediately.She made the coffee, drank half of it while thinking about whether this was worth saying something about.Which, she eventually decided it was.“There’s a board dinner on Thursday,” she said.Avalon was reading something at the table. “Yes. Robert’s organizing it. New board member introduction, the Osei woman Thomas recommended.”“I didn’t know about it.”He looked up. “I mentioned it.”“You didn’t.”“I’m certain I did sometimes last week.”“Avalon.” She set down the mug. “You didn’t mention it, I would remember if you did”He had the expression of a man who was genuinely certain he had mentioned something and was now encountering the equally genuine certainty of someone who had not hea

POV: Selene CastellanoShe woke up at 5 AM with the idea fully formed.She lay in the dark for a moment.Avalon’s breathing beside her was slow and even.She got up.The study at 5 AM had that quality it got before the city remembered itself. The lamp, the quiet, the quality of dark outside the window that was almost but not quite black.She opened her laptop, she didn’t start a document immediately, she just sat with it open and thought about Amara Osei saying nobody designs for the disaster that hasn’t happened yet.Thought deeply about Nene building Pierce Holdings around principles the company had slowly drifted from and about what she’d said to Avalon on their first real terrible night. We stop letting Marcus and the lawsuit define us.What was Pierce Holdings without the lawsuits and the board battles and the men trying to take it apart?What was it supposed to be?She started typing.Not a proposal, just thoughts arriving faster than she could organize them. Thoughts about corp

POV: Selene CastellanoShe read it at 6 AM before Avalon woke up.The Financial Times piece ran to four thousand words and she read every one of them sitting at the kitchen counter in the early quiet with coffee she kept forgetting to drink.The journalist had done the work properly, not sensationalized, or the breathless celebrity adjacent coverage that had followed them through depositions and board battles and federal arrests. This was carefully documented and treated Nene with the seriousness of someone who understood they were writing about a woman who had done something significant.**Lorraine Pierce, matriarch of Pierce Holdings and one of San Francisco’s most enduring business figures, spent nearly three decades in possession of evidence that implicated California State Senator Gerald Whitmore in the death of her son, Jonathan Pierce. The documents, surfaced during federal discovery proceedings related to Whitmore’s ongoing prosecution, reveal a private investigation commissio