Two Empires, One Heart

Chapter Seven

The lawyer’s letter arrived on a Tuesday, thick cream paper, the Calloway family crest embossed at the top like it still meant something to me.

I read it twice before I let myself react.

“He’s stalling,” Freya said, watching my face over her coffee. We’d taken to having breakfast together most mornings now, an easy habit that had crept in without either of us naming it. “That’s what this is. A stalling letter dressed up as a legal position.”

“He wants a mediation period.” I set the letter down between us, my appetite gone. “Six months before either of us can formally file. His lawyer’s calling it a cooling off provision, given the, “ I searched for a word that wouldn’t taste bitter in my mouth, “circumstances.”

“Given the circumstances being that he was caught with his assistant and you’re entitled to half of everything he owns.” Freya’s voice was flat, but there was an edge under it I recognized now, protective in a way that still surprised me every time it surfaced. “He doesn’t want a cooling off period, Selene. He wants time to move assets somewhere you can’t touch them.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way, and hearing it now, plainly, in my sister’s voice, I felt something in me go cold and clear.

“You think he’d actually do that.”

“I think a man who married you for your name isn’t above protecting his money from you now that the name’s inconvenient.” She reached for the letter, scanning it herself. “This is standard delay language. I’ve seen it before, in deals, not divorces, but the tactic’s the same. Slow everything down until the other side loses patience or leverage.”

“I’m not losing patience.”

“Good.” Something almost like approval crossed her face. “Then don’t sign anything until our lawyers have looked at it. All of it.”

I nodded, though my mind was already moving somewhere else, to the boardroom I still hadn’t set foot in, to a name on a folder I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about since Freya had shown me his photograph three days ago.

“There’s something else,” I said. “The Calloway letter. About the alliance.”

Freya’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “You’ve decided.”

“I want to be in the room when they call again. Whenever that is.” I met her eyes, steady. “I want them to understand exactly who they’re dealing with now.”

“That’s a different woman than the one who signed everything over to me two years ago.”

“I’m aware.”

A small, genuine smile crossed her face, quick and real, gone almost as soon as it appeared, but I’d take it. Two weeks ago I wouldn’t have recognized that expression on her at all.

“They called an hour ago, actually,” she said. “I was going to mention it after breakfast. Thursday. Ten o’clock. I told them I’d have to check with my partner.”

“Your partner.”

“You are one, aren’t you? Or were you planning to just observe from the corner like a ghost.” There was no malice in it, just Freya’s particular brand of dry honesty, the kind I was slowly learning to expect and even look forward to.

“No,” I said. “I want a seat at the table. An actual one.”

“Then you’ll have one.” She slid the letter back toward me. “But Selene, if you’re walking back into a room with Calloway representatives in it, you need to know what you’re walking into. Their father’s the one who called. Not a lawyer, not a junior executive. Him, personally.”

Something tightened in my chest. “Why would he call personally.”

“Because he’s desperate enough to skip the usual channels.” Freya studied me for a moment before continuing, careful, like she was deciding how much to hand me at once. “And because I think he wants to see for himself whether the Ashworth name still has enough weight left to save his son’s reputation. Whether you still have enough weight left, specifically.”

I thought about the man who had decided, years ago, that only an Ashworth daughter would do for his son, the same man whose decision had led me, eventually, to a container of rice going cold in a car outside a church I didn’t attend.

“Then he should know,” I said, “that the version of me he’s about to meet isn’t the one his son married.”

Freya raised her coffee slightly, something like a toast. “Good. Because Thursday, you’re going to need to prove that in the room, not just to me over breakfast.”

I looked down at the letter again, at the crest that used to make my chest ache with something like belonging, and felt, for the first time, nothing at all where that ache used to live.

Thursday, I thought. Ten o’clock.

I had four days to remember exactly how to walk into a room like I belonged there.