Semua Bab Go Away Chris : Bab 21 - Bab 30

Chris's POVThe investigation ran quietly in the background of everything else, handled by my legal team with the kind of methodical patience that legal processes require and that I had long since learned not to rush.Gemma's confession, spilled in anger during our last argument, had given us enough to begin with. What the investigation uncovered over the following months was more extensive than even I had anticipated. The network of arrangements my uncle Gregory had constructed was not a simple scheme born of opportunism. It had been built deliberately, over time, with the specific intention of acquiring leverage over me and, through me, over Azul Corporation. I was not the first person Gregory had targeted this way, though I was the most significant.The falsified pregnancy results had required the cooperation of Dr. Vivian, my family's own doctor, who had accepted payment to run another woman's test results under Gemma's name. Mrs. Vivian, who had known my family for decades, who h

Ayesha's POVI woke up before my alarm, which was not unusual. What was unusual was the first thought that arrived before I had even fully opened my eyes, clear and unhurried, like something settling into place rather than something demanding attention.I was engaged.I lay still for a moment and let that be true without doing anything with it. The ring was on the nightstand because I had taken it off before washing my face the night before and then spent a full minute holding it in my palm before setting it down, which was longer than the task required and exactly as long as I needed. I reached for it now and slid it back onto my finger and looked at it in the early morning light coming through the curtains.It was not extravagant. It was exactly right, which told me he had thought about it rather than simply chosen something impressive. A thin gold band with a single oval stone, warm colored, understated, the kind of ring that suited a person rather than announcing itself. I thought

Chris's POVThe final hearing in my uncle Gregory's case was held on a Thursday morning in a courtroom that was smaller than I had expected, which I suppose said something about how much space legal consequence actually requires when it arrives. I sat with my legal team and watched the proceedings with the particular detachment of someone who has had months to arrive at the full shape of what happened and no longer needs the formal process to tell him what he already knows.Gregory did not look at me during the hearing. I had expected either defiance or contrition and received neither, which I found, in the end, more unsettling than either would have been. He sat with his own legal team and looked at the bench and at his papers and at the middle distance, and the man who looked back at me through that careful arrangement of non-expression was not the uncle I had known at family dinners and quarterly meetings and the particular occasions where my family gathered to mark the time passin

Ayesha's POVSix months after the engagement, on a Saturday morning that was otherwise entirely ordinary, Chris and I got married in a small ceremony attended by the people who mattered most to both of us.It was not a grand wedding. I want to be clear about that because it would be easy to assume, given the man I married and the life he came from, that the occasion required scale to match it. It did not. We had both lived through enough performance to know that the things worth having were rarely the things most visible from the outside, and we had planned accordingly.The venue was a room in a house owned by a friend of David's, an old building outside the city with tall windows and worn stone floors and gardens that were not particularly tended but were full of something better than neatness, which was the particular beauty of things that have been allowed to grow in their own direction. My mother sat in the front row in a blue dress she had bought specifically for the occasion and

Ayesha's POVThe collaborative project Diana had been deliberating about for two months was confirmed on a Tuesday in December, which meant we had twelve weeks to mount a show that Diana had described, in the same breath as agreeing to it, as the most ambitious thing either of us had attempted.She was not wrong about that. The project involved three artists working across three interconnected spaces in the gallery, with Diana's large scale pieces serving as the anchor and two younger artists she had mentored informally over the past year contributing smaller, responding works. The concept was Diana's, which meant it was confrontational and precise and required the gallery's new space to be rethought almost entirely in terms of how visitors would move through it.I had said yes before she finished describing it, which Diana noted with the particular satisfaction she took in people meeting her expectations.The twelve weeks that followed were some of the most demanding I had experienc