What Remains
They didn't handcuff her at the estate — Perry Nash had insisted on that much, murmuring something to the two men in suits about not making a spectacle in front of the staff — but Isabel Marchetti, born Vivian Voss, was escorted off Kade land within the hour, facing an extortion charge with her own recorded voice as the centerpiece of the state's case, and a civil suit from a Calder family lawyer who'd apparently been waiting three years for exactly this call.
The ring went back to Josephine's hand, not Sebastian's. He couldn't look at it, he said. Not yet.
He found his grandmother in the small library that evening, in the same chair by the same fire, and for a long moment he just stood in the doorway.
"You knew," he said. "This whole time. About the debt. About her."
"I suspected about her within a week of meeting her," Josephine said. "I confirmed it within a month. As for the debt — I've known for three years, Sebastian. Since the week after your father's funeral, when I sat down with Perry and decided nobody in this family was going to feel that particular kind of poor again if I could help it."
"You could have told me."
"I could have," Josephine agreed. "But you'd have insisted on helping, and you'd have quit the museum board to go into finance you don't love, and you'd have married the first woman who told you she didn't care about the money — without ever finding out whether it was true." She patted the seat beside her. "Instead you found out. The hard way, I'll grant you. But you found out."
Sebastian sat. The fire popped between them, the same fire that had watched Isabel make her offer four days earlier, though the room felt entirely different now — lighter, somehow, with nothing left hidden in it.
"Harlow Meridian really clears the debt next month?" he asked.
"Every cent. And there'll be enough left over, properly invested, that this family won't need to pretend about anything ever again." Josephine reached over and covered his hand with hers, her grip as steady as it had been on Isabel's the night of the engagement party. "I built it in the dark so you could inherit it in the light, Sebastian. That was always the plan."
Outside, the last of the summer light was going gold over the grounds of Kade Hall — real gold, this time, belonging to no one but the family that had earned it back.