The Wife He Rejected Became His Aunt

Chapter Six:The First Meeting

He answered on the second ring.

No greeting. Just silence on the other end that told me he was there and listening.

"It is Lena," I said.

"I know," he said.

Of course he knew. He had my number. He probably knew more than my number. I was beginning to understand that Ethan Kingston was not the kind of man who left gaps in his information.

"Marcus confirmed it," I said. "All of it. The land. His father. The reason we met."

Ethan said nothing for a moment.

"Did he tell you anything new," he said.

"He said his father is already moving. That he has lawyers preparing something. He said it would happen fast now that the marriage is ending."

"He is right about that," Ethan said. "Daniel does not wait when he sees an opportunity closing."

I looked through my windshield at the front door of the house I had shared with Marcus for three years. The flowers I had planted along the front path were still blooming. Pink and white. I had planted them in our first spring together because I wanted the house to feel like a home.

I had tried so hard to make things feel like home.

"What do I do," I said.

It was the first time I had asked anyone that question since the night before. I had been moving. Deciding. Acting. But right now sitting in that car looking at those flowers I felt the weight of everything pressing down and I just needed someone to help me think.

"Meet me tomorrow morning," Ethan said. "My office. Nine o clock. Bring anything you have that belonged to your mother. Documents. Letters. Anything with her name on it."

"I have a box," I said. "From when she passed. I never went through all of it."

There was a pause.

"Bring the whole box," he said.

"Alright," I said.

"Lena."

I stopped.

He had not used my name before. Not like that. Plain and direct.

"You did the right thing today," he said. "Both times."

The line went quiet.

I sat with the phone in my hand for a moment after he hung up. Outside a neighbor walked past with a dog and waved at me through the car window and I lifted my hand and waved back like everything was normal. Like I was just sitting in my car for no reason on a Tuesday afternoon.

Then I started the engine and drove.

I did not go back inside the house that night.

I drove to my friend Sade's apartment instead. Sade was the kind of friend who did not ask too many questions when you showed up at her door with a bag and tired eyes. She opened the door and looked at me and said come in and put the kettle on and that was enough.

I told her some of it. Not everything. Not the land or Ethan or the things Marcus had said in the sitting room. Just the hotel. Just what I had walked in on. Just the anniversary and the red dress and the way he had sighed like I was an inconvenience.

Sade listened without interrupting.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I never liked him."

I almost smiled. "You told me he was charming when you met him."

"Charming and trustworthy are not the same thing," she said. "I should have said that louder at the time."

She made up the spare room for me and I lay in the dark on a bed that was not mine in a room that smelled like her lavender candles and I stared at the ceiling.

I thought about my mother.

Grace Whitfield. Before that Grace Omen. Smart. The kind of woman who made people want to listen. I had not thought about her that way before. I had thought about her as my mother. As the woman who braided my hair on Sunday mornings and made groundnut soup from scratch and sang off key to old music in the kitchen. I had not thought about her as a woman who had been betrayed by powerful people.

But she had been.

And somehow her betrayal and mine had ended up connected.

I fell asleep thinking about her face.

Ethan's office building was in the center of the city.

Glass and steel and the kind of quiet that expensive buildings have. Not silent. Just controlled. Like even the air inside had been arranged carefully. I walked through the lobby at five minutes to nine with my mother's box under my arm and a coat over my shoulders and I told the woman at the front desk my name.

She made a call. Nodded. Told me to take the elevator to the twenty second floor.

The elevator was mirrored on three sides. I saw myself from every angle. I looked tired but I had dressed carefully. Dark trousers. A cream blouse. Simple earrings. I had learned a long time ago that when the world is falling apart around you the least you can do is hold yourself together on the outside.

The doors opened on twenty two.

A young man in a grey suit was waiting. He introduced himself as Cole, Ethan's assistant. He walked me down a corridor with high ceilings and very little decoration and stopped at a set of double doors and knocked once before opening them.

The office was large but not showy.

A wide desk near the window. Shelves of files along one wall. A table with four chairs in the corner. The city spread out behind the glass like a painting.

Ethan was standing at the window when I walked in.

He turned.

In the daylight he looked different from the coffee shop. More defined somehow. Like the morning light made everything about him clearer. He was wearing a dark suit today and his face was as still as it had been the day before.

He looked at the box under my arm.

"Sit down," he said.

I sat at the table and placed the box in front of me. He came and sat across from me and for a moment we just looked at each other.

"Thank you for coming," he said.

"I did not have many other options," I said.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. But close.

"Open the box," he said.

I lifted the lid.

Inside was what I had expected. Old papers. A few photographs. My mother's handwriting on envelopes that had never been sent. A small notebook with a broken spine. Things I had packed away six years ago because I could not face them.

I had not opened this box since the week after her funeral.

I lifted the papers out carefully and set them on the table between us. Ethan leaned forward and looked at them without touching anything. His eyes moved slowly. Reading. Scanning.

Then he stopped.

He reached out and picked up one folded document near the bottom of the pile.

He opened it.

Read it.

And then he looked up at me with something in his eyes that had not been there before.

"Do you know what this is," he said.

I looked at the paper in his hands.

"No," I said.

He turned it around and placed it flat on the table in front of me.

"This changes everything," he said quietly.

I looked down at the document.

And my mother's name stared back at me from the top of the page beside a name I recognized immediately.

Daniel Kingston.