I couldn’t help the resentment. It was one thing to be a teenage girl asking my grandmother for money for seasonal fittings or an extra trip to Paris with friends. Had I been given full access to my trust at that age, it would have almost certainly disappeared in a matter of years, if not months. But now I was thirty-one. And still begging my cousin, who was more like a brother, for pocket money.
Yet another cage from which I longed to be free.
“I—I didn’t realize,” Eric said, looking a bit ashamed.
“Didn’t realize that Grandmother held nearly all the purse strings and then handed them to you?” I replied dryly.
Eric swallowed and turned back to the attorneys. “Okay, so he’s tying things up because he thinks I’ll pay him off. For the record, I’m not against it—”
“Eric, no,” I put in, but he held up his hand, steely-eyed and suddenly resembling our grandmother more than I’d ever seen.
“Nina, it’s the least I can do. I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. Maybe if I had been, you’d never have gotten wrapped up with the bastard.” He turned back to Delia and Barney. “Billions, no. I’ll have to speak to my finance guys, but I think we could put together a package worth up to five hundred million, likely including some stocks in other companies, possibly a subsidiary that we can let go. The penthouse and that creepy island. But no ownership of the company. That’s a hard line. Can you feel out his interest? Don’t name the number.”
Delia and Barney both frantically jotted down the details Eric had listed. My mouth was dry. Inheritance or not, five hundred million was far more than I was ever going to call my own. Calvin would be a fool not to take it. And perhaps that made Eric a fool for even offering.
Every iota of resentment I’d felt before melted away…and immediately turned to guilt.
“Of course, Mr. de Vries.” Barney nodded, and Delia shoved her notes into her briefcase.
I stood up and walked to a window looking onto West Seventy-Sixth Street, watching the occasional car drive past, a few people walking quickly home from work. They had places to be. Homes of their own. Refuges to return to.
I was tired of this. So, so tired. For the first time in over ten years, I had energy to fight, to do something more than lie back and allow whatever misfortune to wash over me like a dirty tide. Yet, once again, I was powerless. Despite only just having been freed from one actual cage, I was still a trapped animal. The world was out there, so close, waiting for me to touch it, and I was tired of everyone else holding the keys to my freedom but me. I wished desperately I knew how to pick the locks.
“It’s kind of strange, you know,” Jane said. “All the changes Celeste made before she died.”
I turned around. “Like what?”
“Like changing the terms of your trust so that you couldn’t access it until you were forty.”
I grimaced. It had been a lovely surprise last spring to learn that my thirtieth birthday no longer marked full ownership of my assets. I’d paid for it too when Calvin found out. Absently, I rubbed my elbow. That bruise had taken months to disappear.
“And then when she funneled all of your shares of the company out of your name and into Eric’s,” Jane added.
“Yes,” I said wryly. “It almost seems like she didn’t think she could trust me with my own money.”
“Or she knew this was going to happen, Nina. She knew that rat would try to take it all.”
I crossed my arms, hugging my thin frame, which had gotten even thinner over the last few months. Everything tasted like sawdust. I could barely swallow seltzer water.
“Then why did she let me marry him in the first place?” I asked bitterly. “Grandmother hated Calvin. That was never a secret. If she liked to control everyone so much, why not that too?”
Eric shrugged as he crossed one ankle elegantly over his knee and toyed with a loose lock of Jane’s hair. “Well, you never did tell anyone that he wasn’t Olivia’s father. So far as we all knew, he was. She probably just thought he had the right to his own family, at least.”
An awkward silence descended over the table. Eric and Jane had taken the news that Olivia wasn’t Calvin’s biological child in stride, but I did wonder if my cousin was a bit hurt that I had kept up such a lie after his return to the family fold. They had, however, agreed not to say anything to Olivia until I found the right time. The problem was, I wasn’t sure when that would be.
“There is…one other option here,” Barney ventured.
The lawyer withdrew a document and set it on the table. I walked closer to examine it and immediately recoiled. It was a nondisclosure agreement that effectively forced me to do nothing but take the fifth if and when I was called to the stand in Calvin’s trial.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“Ms. de Vries, your testimony in Mr. Gardner’s criminal trial is arguably worth more than anything. If you agreed not to testify—”
“No,” I said viciously. “That was the entire point of taking the plea, was it not? The whole reason I suffered the last two weeks was to be able to put him away.”
“It was part of her plea deal,” Jane supplied helpfully, having been a prosecutor herself at one point. “And if she breaks it, she’ll be taken back to court.”
“We may be able to renegotiate that,” Delia replied. “I still think there’s an argument for spousal privilege.”
Jane shrugged. “If it were me, I’d subpoena her regardless, and I’d probably win. Most judges won’t uphold spousal privilege if said spouse is accessory
