I Married My Father's Worst Enemy

Chapter 3: The Signature

My father doesn't come home until nine that night, and when he does, I'm sitting in the dark of the living room waiting for him like a ghost, the funeral photo still folded in my coat pocket.

"Whose signature is on the death certificate?"

He flips on the light, and for a second he just stands there, keys still in his hand, looking at me like I'm a stranger.

"Elena—"

"Whose signature, Dad?"

He sets his keys down very carefully, like the sound of them hitting the table might break something. "Mine. As executor. It's standard when—"

"Was it standard for you to be executor of your partner's estate six weeks after his company collapsed because of fraud you supposedly had nothing to do with?"

His silence answers before he does.

I want him to argue. I want him to slam his hand on the table and tell me I've got it backwards, that the father who taught me to drive and cried at my college graduation would never let an innocent man take the blame for his own crime. He doesn't do any of that. He just sits there, getting smaller.

"I didn't forge anything," he finally says. "I want you to hear that. I never touched those filings."

"But you knew."

"I found out. After. When it was already—"

"When it was already convenient." My voice breaks on the word convenient, and I hate that it does. "You knew Edmund didn't do it. You knew, and you let a dead man take the blame, and you signed the paperwork that made sure nobody would ever ask questions, and then you built Hartley Group on top of his grave."

"It wasn't like that."

"Then tell me what it was like."

He doesn't. He sits down heavily in his chair, and for the first time, my father looks small to me. Not powerful. Not the man who built an empire. Just a man who made a choice twenty years ago and has been running from it ever since, and dragged me into the wreckage without ever telling me I was standing in one.

I go up to my room a little after midnight and I don't cry, not right away. I sit on the edge of the bed with the funeral photo in my hands and I think about every interview, every gala, every reporter who ever asked me how my father built an empire out of nothing while I smiled and said hard work, integrity, vision.

Four years. I spent four years as Director of Communications for Hartley Group, selling a story that was never true.

That's when the crying finally comes, quiet, into a pillow, so nobody else in the house has to know that Richard Hartley's daughter just figured out exactly what kind of man raised her.

I sign the contract two days later, in a conference room on the fortieth floor of Ashford Global, with two lawyers and my father sitting stiff and silent at the end of the table like a man at his own execution.

Nobody offers me coffee. Nobody makes small talk. The air conditioning hums too loud, the kind of silence that has a texture to it, and one of the lawyers walks me through it in a flat, practiced voice before anyone slides me a pen. The house stays in my father's name. The pension fund stays funded. Three hundred severance packages stay intact through the transition. What doesn't stay is Hartley Group — not the name, not the building, not my father's seat on his own board. All of it transfers to Damon, effective the date of the marriage.

Damon sits across from me. He hasn't said a word since I walked in.

"You don't have to do this," he says, low, just for me, while the lawyers murmur over the final pages. It's the first thing that's sounded uncertain out of his mouth since I've known him as an adult.

"Three hundred families," I say. "You said it yourself. Everyone has a choice. This is mine."

"That's not the only reason and we both know it."

I don't answer that, because he's right, and I'm not ready to look at why.

The pen is heavier than it should be. My hand doesn't shake, which surprises me. I sign my name on the line that makes me Damon Ashford's wife in nineteen days, and underneath it, in smaller print, the clause the lawyer already read out loud — the one that means my father won't just lose the company on paper. He'll lose it the moment I say "I do."

I look up at Damon. "You didn't have to let the lawyer spell it out. You could have just let me sign blind."

"You didn't ask what you were agreeing to at my father's study. You just agreed." His eyes hold mine, unreadable. "I'm not going to be the reason you walked into this without knowing. That should scare you more than it does."

Maybe it should. It doesn't, and that's the part that scares me.

The lawyers gather the pages. My father won't look at either of us. And just as I set the pen down, Damon's phone buzzes on the table between us.

He glances at it the way you glance at something you're expecting and dreading in equal measure.

Then he goes still.

The lawyers keep talking, oblivious, papers rustling, and for three full seconds Damon Ashford doesn't seem to hear a word of it.

Not annoyed. Not irritated the way a man gets over a work interruption.

Still, like something in the message has reached inside his chest and closed a fist around it.

"Damon." I say his name for the first time without the word Uncle attached to it, and it feels strange in my mouth, too intimate for what we are to each other, exactly right for what we're about to become. "What is it?"

He turns the phone face down against the table.

"Nothing you need to worry about tonight."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agrees. "It isn't."

He stands, buttons his jacket, and for the first time since he walked into my father's study a week ago, Damon Ashford looks like a man who isn't fully in control of what happens next.

That terrifies me more than anything else he's told me so far.