All Chapters of Not The Man She Wanted: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

He knocked at seven on a Thursday evening.Harry opened the door. Fabiola was in a plain jacket and dark jeans, the off-duty version of himself that had become more frequent since the board appointment, as if the interim CEO role had, paradoxically, given him permission to dress like a person rather than a position. He was holding a bottle of red wine by the neck."Is she here?" he said."In the kitchen," Harry said. "Jo is asleep.""Good." He held up the bottle. "I am not going to drink this. I brought it because I did not know what else to bring and it seemed like the kind of thing you bring when you need to have a difficult conversation.""That is one approach," Harry said."Do you have a better one?""I usually just show up," Harry said."Yes," Fabiola said. "You are better at that than I am."Harry took the bottle.He looked at his brother for a moment."Do you need me to stay or go?" he said."Go," Fabiola said. "Please.""I will be in the back room.""Thank you."Harry set the

The courtroom was smaller than I expected.I do not know what I had expected. Something larger, perhaps, more proportional to the size of what had been done and the years it had taken to arrive here. What the federal courthouse on Spring Street offered was a room with wooden benches and fluorescent lighting and the particular smell of a place where consequential things happened in ordinary surroundings.I had Jo in the carrier against my chest.Renata had told me not to bring her."It is a pretrial motion," she had said. "Not a trial. There is no jury to see you. It is just lawyers and a judge.""I know," I had said."Then why..""Because I have been waiting fourteen months to sit in a room with him and know that the room belongs to someone else," I had said. "And I want her there when it happens."Renata had looked at Jo."Fine," she had said. "Keep her quiet."We arrived at eight forty.Harry was beside me. My mother had come but stayed in the hall at Renata's request, one fewer va

The press conference was at two o'clock on a Wednesday.I watched it on Harry's laptop at the kitchen table with Jo in my lap and a cup of tea I had made and forgotten to drink. Harry was beside me. My mother had called at one fifty-seven to say she was watching on her television and we should not call her during it.The Royal Gold Mine logo was behind the podium. The same logo that had been on the building where I had worked for five years, on the letterhead of the contract I had signed, on the magazine cover where my face had been used without my meaningful consent. The logo of a company built on my grandfather's land and my father's discovery and thirty-eight years of careful, documented theft.Fabiola walked to the podium at two oh three.He was in the dark suit. No tie. He had been doing that recently, the no tie, which was either a deliberate signal or simply a man who had stopped performing for audiences that no longer required the performance."He looks like himself," Harry sa

Harry asked on a Tuesday afternoon.Not with ceremony. He was washing the lunch dishes and I was at the table with Jo and the Renata file I had been reviewing for an hour without making progress, and he turned from the sink and said, "Have dinner with me tonight.""We eat dinner together every night," I said."Not like that," he said. "Dinner out. The two of us. Jo counts as a chaperone, not a third party."I looked at him.He was still holding the dish towel."The divorce filing is public," he said. "It was in the Constitution this morning. Whatever we are is no longer a thing that requires managing.""It is still a thing that might end up in Celestine Park's column.""Let it," he said. "I am done managing the optics of my own life."I looked at the Renata file.I looked at Jo.I looked at Harry with the dish towel."What time?" I said.He had made a reservation.Not a Royal Gold Mine dinner reservation, not the kind that required a phone call to a maître d' who knew Alvin's name and

The prosecution called Fabiola on the seventeenth day.He had known it was coming. Renata had told him two weeks before. He had spent those two weeks the way he spent everything now, quietly and without announcement, preparing in whatever room he was in rather than making the preparation visible.He walked to the stand in a plain dark suit.No tie.He sat down.He looked at the prosecutor, a woman named Agent Carla Webb who had been building federal cases for nineteen years and had the specific economy of movement of someone who did not waste anything in a courtroom.He did not look at his father.Not yet."Mr. Alejandro," Webb said, "you served as managing director of Royal Gold Mine for eleven years, correct?""Yes," Fabiola said."And in that capacity you had access to internal financial records, operational decisions, and communications at the executive level?""Yes.""Did you, at any point during those eleven years, have knowledge of financial transactions routed through the comp