All Chapters of Six Months Of You: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

30 Chapters

Chapter Eleven: Seven Forty Five

#LENA The attorney's name is Grace Okafor and she meets us in the lobby of her office building at seven forty two wearing a coat over what is clearly a very early morning and carrying a coffee that suggests she has been awake since Elena called. She looks at me. She looks at Landon. She looks at the folder. "Come in," she says. Her office is small and very organized. She puts on reading glasses and she reads every page of Elena's file without rushing. Landon sits beside me and neither of us speaks. I watch Grace Okafor's face as she reads. She does not react dramatically. She turns pages. She makes small notations on a pad. When she finishes she takes off her glasses. "This is thorough," she says to Elena. "Twelve years," Elena says. Grace looks at the trust document. At the blank line. At the restructuring clause. "You want this filled in and notarized this morning." "Before eight thirty," I say. "His father makes a call to the clinic at business hours." "You know that." "

Chapter Twelve: The Scholarship

#LENA The academic review board meets Wednesday at nine AM. I walk in with three things. My dated draft files showing the composition's development across eight weeks. An email chain with Professor Valdez discussing the theoretical framework. And a one page document from Grace Okafor's office demonstrating that the misconduct complaint originated through a firm with documented financial ties to an individual currently under financial crimes investigation. The conflict of interest is explicit. The board chair reads the conflict of interest document first. She reads it twice. She looks at the other two board members. One of them I recognize as the deputy head who dropped the earlier review. She is looking at the table. The chair looks at me. "Miss Kato. This review was initiated by a third party complaint. Given the documentation you have provided regarding the complainant's conflict of interest, this board is required to assess the validity of the complaint's origin before proceed

Chapter Thirteen: Both Depending

#LENA He is at Common Grounds when I arrive. He has two coffees and he looks like someone who has been thinking hard all day and has arrived at something he is not sure how to say. I sit down. I take the coffee. I wait. "My father called his attorney this morning," he says. "Not about the investigation. About me." He looks at the table for a moment. "He is moving to cut me off entirely. Tuition. Living expenses. Everything. He filed the paperwork this morning." I look at him. "When does it take effect." "End of the month." He pauses. "I have four weeks of funding left." I think about that. "Football." "My scholarship covers tuition. Room and board is separate." He meets my eyes. "I can manage. I have savings. Enough to get through the year." He says it like someone who has already done the math and is not looking for reassurance. "That is not the part I needed to tell you." I wait. "The investigation is moving fast," he says. "Faster than Grace expected. Marcus Hale retained

Chapter Fourteen: After

#LENA Three weeks later the investigation produces its first formal finding. Marcus Hale accepts a cooperation agreement. Richard Cross retains counsel and issues no public statement. Cross Capital is placed under regulatory review pending the investigation outcome. The merger is formally withdrawn. I find out from Priya who finds out from a school wide email that the Westbrook gymnasium naming rights are under review pending the investigation into Cross Capital's conduct. I read that line twice. Then I close my laptop and I go to practice. I have a conservatory audition in two months. Not Paris yet, that comes later, but a regional program that leads there if you work hard enough and want it clearly enough. Professor Valdez thinks I am ready. I think I need eight more weeks. We have agreed to meet in the middle. I play Bach. The suite my grandfather taught me. The one that always sounds like a door opening in a wall you thought was solid. My phone buzzes on the chair. Landon

Chapter Fifteen: Thursday

He knocked. I was mid phrase when I heard it and I finished the phrase before I looked up, because you finished the phrase, you didn't stop in the middle. When I finally set the bow down and said come in, something was already different about the way I had said it. Like I had been waiting. Landon opened the door and leaned against the frame the way he had the first morning, but nothing else was the same. No contract. No performance. Just him in the doorway of my practice room with his hands in his pockets and his green eyes finding mine. "You're early," I told him. "You said Thursday." He came inside. He sat in the chair by the window. "It's Thursday." "It's four forty seven." "I said I'd be here." He settled back. "I'm here." I looked at him for a moment. Then I turned back to my music stand and found the piece I had been working on for the past two weeks. New composition. Not Bach, not anything assigned. Something that had started as a scale pattern one night after the schol

Chapter Sixteen: What Priya Knows

I told Priya everything on Friday evening. All of it. The contract. Leo's surgery. The first payment. The jacket. Richard Cross. Dana Marsh in my room. Elena. Grace Okafor. Monday morning in that lobby. The scholarship hearing. The trust. All of it from the beginning, every piece I had been carrying alone for two months. Priya sat on my bed with her tea and didn't interrupt once. She was very good at this, the particular skill of being quiet while someone told you a hard thing. When I finished she wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at me. "You did all of that," she said, "and you didn't tell me." "I couldn't. The confidentiality clause." "The confidentiality clause is resolved now." "Yes." "So you're telling me now." "Yes." She looked at her tea. "How much of it was real." I knew what she was asking. "The contract was real. The arrangement was real." I paused. "The rest of it is still being decided." "The rest of it being him." "Yes." "Room 214 last night." I l

Chapter Seventeen: Margaret

She was smaller than I expected. Margaret Cross sat up in a chair by the window of her hospital room with a blanket across her lap and a book face down on the table beside her. She had Landon's green eyes and she used them the same way, steadily and with full attention, like looking at something halfway wasn't worth doing. I sat in the chair Landon pulled across from hers. He sat on the edge of the bed. Between the three of us the room was quiet in a way that wasn't uncomfortable. "You're the cellist," she said. "Yes." "Landon told me you play Bach." "My grandfather taught me." "He told me that too." She looked at me carefully. "He tells me you're very practical." "He's being kind." "He doesn't do kind inaccurately." Something moved at the corner of her mouth, close to a smile but quieter than that. "He means it as a compliment. In this family, practical is not a small thing." I thought about Richard Cross. About the trust and the clinic and four years of leverage. "I unders

Chapter Eighteen: The Investigation Closes

The formal findings came out on a Thursday. Richard Cross was charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud and money laundering facilitation. Marcus Hale had accepted a plea agreement and was cooperating. Cross Capital was ordered to cease operations pending the investigation outcome. Six civil suits had been filed by the clients whose accounts Marcus Hale had misused. The school sent a second email. Richard Cross had been formally removed from the board of donors. The gymnasium naming rights were being transferred to a community health foundation. Effective immediately. I read the emails in the library during a free period, then put my phone down and looked out the window at the east parking garage visible across the quad. I thought about the first morning I had come to this library with a pen and a list of conditions. How much I hadn't known then about what I was walking into. I thought about forty seven dollars. My phone rang. My mother. "I saw the news," she said. "I

Chapter Nineteen: Room 214

He was already there when I arrived. The piano fallboard was open and he was sitting on the bench with his hands in his lap, not playing. The room was lit this time, both of us early enough to have caught the last of the afternoon light through the windows. I set my case down. I took out my cello. "You're early again," I told him. "I've been early every time." "I've noticed." He looked at me. "Is that a problem." "No," I said. "I've been early too." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. I settled the cello into position and played a long slow scale to warm up. Landon watched, then turned back to the piano and began his own warmup, scales first the way I had done it every time we were in this room, until he had started doing it too without my saying anything. We had been meeting in room 214 for three weeks. Every Thursday, some Tuesdays, and once on a Sunday when I had come back early from home and texted him without thinking about it, the way you texted someone when s

Chapter Twenty: Six Weeks

The conservatory audition was on a Saturday. I was up at five. I dressed in the dark and made coffee and sat at my desk and did not practice, because Professor Valdez had told me not to practice the morning of. The preparation was already done. The morning of was for being still and trusting the work. I was not naturally good at being still. My phone buzzed at five forty. Landon. How are you sleeping. I'm not sleeping, I typed. It's five forty. I know. I'm awake too. Why are you awake. A pause. Because you have an audition today. I looked at that message in the pre-dawn quiet of my room. You didn't have to do that, I typed. I know, he said. I wanted to. I made a second cup of coffee. I sat at my desk. Outside the window the campus was still dark, the lit paths empty, the stone buildings solid and quiet. I thought about the composition I was going to play today. Not just Bach. They had asked for two pieces. One standard, one original. I was playing the Sarabande from the f

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