Chapter 8 - The Aftermath
I stood in the courthouse plaza beneath the gray April sky.
Marcus Vance stood beside me, lighting a thin cigar with a silver lighter. Across the plaza, Donald Reed was leading his weeping daughters toward an Uber. Madison walked with her head down, her coat collar pulled high, trying to shield her face from the three freelance photographers who were still clicking away from the sidewalk.
She looked small. Stripped of her father’s credit cards, her fake fiancé, and her curated Instagram lifestyle, she was just an insecure thirty-year-old woman who had traded seventeen years of friendship for a handful of dirt and a mountain of legal debt.
As they reached the curb, Madison stopped.
She turned and looked back across the fifty yards of wet concrete directly at me.
For a long moment, our eyes met.
There was no rage left in her gaze. Only an overwhelming, drowning shame. She opened her mouth slightly, as if she wanted to shout something across the plaza—an apology, an excuse, a plea for the clock to turn back to last Thursday before she had ever stepped onto my lawn.
I didn't give her the satisfaction of an emotional reaction.
I slowly brought my right hand up, rested it against the lapel of my wool coat, letting the platinum and sapphire ring of Margaret Holloway catch the gray daylight, and turned my back on her.
"Cashier's check just hit my client trust account," Marcus said, blowing a thin plume of blue smoke into the chilly air. "Two hundred and twelve thousand dollars. Cleared and verified."
"Use forty thousand to pay down the line of credit immediately," I said. "And transfer the rest to the estate trust."
"And the house?" Marcus asked, looking sideways at me. "Are you going to sell it? I know several buyers who would pay cash above market value just to tear it down and build three modern row houses."
I looked at him, horrified. "Tear it down?"
"Just checking, Claire-bear," Marcus smiled gently, tapping the ash from his cigar. "Some people find it hard to live in a place that has been violated like that."
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"They didn't violate the house, Marcus," I said, breathing in the cold, clean Pacific Northwest air. "They just exposed themselves on my grass. The house was here long before Evan Mercer walked into my life, and it will be here long after he’s forgotten inside a prison cell."
***
