All Chapters of The Inheritance Clause: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

POV: Selene CastellanoAmara came back on Monday with thirty seven pages.Selene had sent fourteen pages but Amara returned thirty seven which meant she’d spent the weekend not just reviewing but building and adding the structural framework that Selene’s instincts had correctly identified as necessary but hadn’t yet known how to construct.She sat across from Selene at the dining table and opened her laptop with the focused energy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this kind of problem.“Your instincts are right,” Amara said. “The foundation has to live inside the company, not beside it. If it does live beside it, it becomes a PR exercise within eighteen months. Inside it has teeth.”“The board will push back on the resource allocation.”“Some will but Robert won’t. Thomas Reeves won’t also because it serves his interests to be associated with something legitimate and he’s smart enough to know it.” She paused. “Daniel Frost will need convincing.”“What convinces Daniel Frost?

POV: Maya CastellanoThe last morning in Accra arrived too quickly.She’d packed the night before. Properly this time not three versions of herself in a suitcase. Just what she’d brought and what she was taking back which included the finished novel and something else she didn’t have a word for yet.Kofi drove her to the airport.They didn’t talk much on the way but not an uncomfortable silence.She checked in while he waited.At the security line she turned around.He was standing where she’d left him with his hands in his pockets watching her with that expression she’d been cataloguing since the Mission and had run out of ways to misread.“Thank you,” she said. “For the everything”“When I get back,” he said.“When you back,” she agreed.She turned and went through security without looking back because she’d learned that looking back made leaving harder.She slept on the plane.She woke up somewhere over the Atlantic.She thought about Kofi saying you’re remarkable and things happe

POV: Selene CastellanoThe board presentation was at ten but Selene had been awake since five.Not anxiously, just awake because her body apparently had decided that sleep was optional when something mattered enough.She lay in the dark and ran through the presentation in her head and Dr. Amara Osei, who would be presenting alongside her, which meant one friendly face at the table.Then there is James Okonkwo, a Nigerian–Lagos born tech investor who’d joined the board six weeks ago and said very little in meetings and watched everything. Avalon’s breathing shifted beside her.“You’re running through it,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”“I wasn’t asleep.”She turned her head. In the dark she could make out the line of his jaw, the ceiling above him he was looking at.“You were doing the ceiling thing,” she said.“What ceiling thing.”“The thing where you stare at the ceiling and think so loudly I can feel it.”“I was thinking about Daniel Frost,” he said. “He’s going to ask about the fi

POV: Avalon PierceHe made dinner that night, he had gone to the store in the late afternoon while Selene was on a call with Amara and came back with things that required actual cooking rather than just heat.He wasn’t a good cook.He cooked anyway because some things required the specific physicality of standing at a stove making something with your hands. Of being useful in a way that was uncomplicated.Selene appeared in the kitchen doorway at seven.She looked at the stove, the various pots and the general ambitious chaos of someone who had committed to a recipe without fully considering what the recipe involved.“What is this?” she said.“Dinner.”“What kind of dinner?”“The kind that requires forty minutes and three pots apparently.”She came and stood beside him. “You’re making Lasagna,” she said.“Attempting.”“Why?”He thought about how to answer that.“You told me once that your mother made it when something needed to be marked,” he said. “When something deserved acknowledg

POV: Avalon PierceHe found the photograph on a Wednesday, inside one of the boxes of Nene’s personal effects that Margaret had kept in storage and sent over when the foundation work began. Tax documents or old correspondence was what his thoughts were.Instead at the bottom of the third box, wrapped in tissue paper was a photograph.His father.He looked young, maybe twenty five. He was standing outside a building Avalon didn’t recognize in a city he couldn’t place. He was laughing at something outside the frame. It was an unaware photograph.He sat down on the study floor.Held it close to him because he already had three photographs of his father. This made it four.In the other three his father was posed and was aware of the camera. This one he was just himself.Laughing.Not knowing he was being kept.He sat on the floor for a long time, his eyes blistering from tears he refuses to shed.He thought about a man building a case against someone powerful because it was the right thi