Chapter 7 - The Inheritance of Ashes
The Manhattan apartment felt different now—larger, brighter, completely cleansed of any lingering ghosts. The heavy, suffocating aura that Béatrice and Arthur had tried to weave around me like a spiderweb had been shredded beyond repair.
I sat at the glass dining table, reviewing the final restructuring documents for the Vance Foundation’s new initiative. The launch of our fellowship program for women in STEM had gone live at midnight, and the server traffic was already breaking records. Thousands of applications were pouring in from women who had faced economic disenfranchisement, corporate gaslighting, and systemic financial abuse.
My phone buzzed on the marble surface. An unknown number.
I ignored it, but it rang again immediately. Then a third time. With a sigh of mild annoyance, I swiped the screen and pressed speaker.
"Elena?"
The voice was thin, raspy, and stripped of its former venom. It was Béatrice.
"Béatrice," I said, my tone flat, unbothered, and utterly devoid of the polite deference she had always demanded. "To what do I owe the profound displeasure?"
There was a ragged hitch of breath on the other end of the line. The proud matriarch of the Laurent family—the woman who had sat on my bridal bed smoking a menthol cigarette while plotting my financial execution—was currently hiding in a modest, unheated townhouse in upstate New York, abandoned by her socialite friends and cut off from her offshore trust funds.
"Arthur... Arthur is in the hospital," Béatrice whispered, her voice trembling with barely suppressed panic. "He had a severe panic attack yesterday. The investigators... they froze his remaining personal accounts. We have nothing left, Elena. Not even our legal defense retainer. Please... you’re a sensible girl. Talk to your father. Have him drop the civil charges. We can settle this quietly."
I let out a soft, cold laugh that echoed against the empty walls of my living room.
"Sensible," I repeated, tasting the word. "That was your favorite word for me, wasn't it? Because you thought 'sensible' meant 'stupid.' You thought I would quietly accept a fake apartment and a planned divorce while you and your golden-boy son divided my life like a stock portfolio."
"Elena, we are family—" she started, her voice rising in desperate pitch.
May you like
"We are nothing," I interrupted sharply, cutting through her plea like a scalpel. "You made your bed, Béatrice. Literally. Now lie in the dust beneath it, just like you made me do on my wedding night. Goodbye."
I hung up the phone, blocked the number, and watched the digital screen go dark.
