Nathaniel made coffee because doing something with his hands was the only way to stop them from shaking.
Claire sat at the kitchen island across from him while Marcus’s voice filled the room through the phone speaker, steady and old and weighted with the kind of guilt that had been carried too long.
“Vanessa Hunt did not meet you by accident,” Marcus said. “Her father, before his company collapsed, came to me with information about our merger practices. He threatened to go public. I paid him to stay quiet, but he kept the documents as insurance. When he died, Vanessa inherited them.”
“I know about the settlement,” Nathaniel said. “You should have told me before I married her.”
“I know,” Marcus said. “I told myself she did not know. I convinced myself she had married you for the same re
