Chapter 3 - The Gala Dilemma & The Paperwork
By ten o'clock the following morning, my phone had accumulated forty-seven missed calls, twenty-two text messages, and four voicemails from numbers I had deliberately assigned to my silent ring list.
I sat in the corner booth of a quiet café on Lexington Avenue, three blocks from Aegis headquarters. Across from me sat Amanda.
She had called me eighteen times between midnight and six in the morning. When I finally answered at seven-fifteen, her voice had been frantic, breathy, and devoid of the ice she had wielded so effortlessly the night before. She had begged—literally begged—for twenty minutes alone. *No parents. No James. Just us, Livia. Please.*
Now, she was sitting across from me, wearing large Chanel sunglasses indoors to hide the puffiness around her eyes. Her fingers, stripped of her usual stack of rings except for her diamond wedding band, gripped a paper cup of green tea as if it were the only solid object in a spinning universe.
"You have to stop this," Amanda whispered, leaning across the small wooden table. "Olivia, Mother hasn't slept. She had Dr. Morrison come to the penthouse at four in the morning to give her a sedative. Her blood pressure is through the roof."
"If Mother has high blood pressure, she should speak to her physician, not her landlord," I replied calmly, setting down my espresso cup.
"Don't call yourself that!" Amanda’s voice rose, a sharp, panicked edge cutting through the quiet hum of the café. Two women at an adjacent table glanced over, and Amanda instantly ducked her head, pulling her trench coat tighter around herself. "You're my sister. You're Katherine and Richard’s daughter! How can you sit there and act like you're some corporate raider holding an eviction notice over our heads?"
"Because twelve hours ago, Amanda, you sat on that Italian sofa and told me I was too poor to belong in this family. You told me my car was an embarrassment, my career was a joke, and that I needed to submit to an arranged marriage with a con artist to save the Peterson name."
"We didn't know!" Amanda cried softly, her eyes welling with tears behind her tinted lenses. "We thought you were failing! You live in a walk-up! You wear clothes from outlet stores! How were we supposed to know you were running an empire?"
I leaned forward, looking directly into the dark lenses of her glasses.
"That’s the difference between us, Amanda. You think wealth is something you put on display so strangers will envy you. You think it's a handbag, a car lease, and an address you can't afford. To me, wealth is freedom. It’s autonomy. It’s the ability to walk into a room and know that no one—not my boss, not my husband, and certainly not my mother—can tell me who I have to be to earn my seat at the table."
Amanda swallowed hard. Her lower lip was trembling. "James is losing his mind, Olivia. He’s at home right now tearing his office apart. He says if you audit the lease on 14B, the bank will freeze his operating accounts."
"Why would the bank freeze his accounts over a simple lease audit, Amanda?" I asked, watching her face closely.
She looked away, her gaze darting toward the street window. "I don't know. He doesn't tell me everything about his business."
"He tells you nothing about his business," I corrected her. "James has been paying the rent on Penthouse 14B using unauthorized credit draws from Michael Lambert’s offshore entities. He’s been using Father’s name on corporate guarantees without Father’s knowledge. Did you know that?"
Amanda’s mouth opened slightly. She pulled off her sunglasses, revealing red-rimmed, terrified eyes. "What? No. No, James said... he said he was helping Father manage his estate during the market downturn."
"James is drowning, Amanda. And he was planning to use me as his life raft."
I pulled a crisp, single-page legal document from my briefcase and placed it on the table between us.
Amanda looked down at it. "What is this?"
"It’s an invitation," I said. "Next Thursday is the annual Heritage Society Gala. The gala that Mother told me I was forbidden from attending because my presence would degrade the family’s social circle."
"Olivia, Mother only said that because she was angry—"
"The Heritage Society Gala is being held at the Grand Belcourt Ballroom on 5th Avenue," I continued, ignoring her interruption. "Do you know who owns the Grand Belcourt, Amanda?"
Amanda blinked, a cold realization slowly dawning behind her eyes. "You... you don't."
"Aegis Urban Holdings closed on the Belcourt portfolio six months ago," I said calmly. "I am not only attending the gala, Amanda. I am the host. My company is the primary underwriter for the event. The society board answer to me for every table assignment, every catering contract, and every guest badge."
Amanda stared at the paper as if it were a scorpion.
"I have assigned Unit 14B a full table in the center tier," I said. "You, James, Mother, and Father. You will attend. You will wear your best dresses. You will sit at that table, and you will behave like a family that respects one another."
"Why are you doing this?" Amanda whispered, her voice trembling. "If you hate us this much, why don't you just evict us? Why don't you just throw us into the street and be done with it?"
"Because unlike Mother, I don't throw family away when they become inconvenient," I said, standing up from the booth. "And unlike James, I don't destroy people from behind shell companies. I give people the chance to see the truth about themselves."
I picked up my purse.
"Tell James that the audit on 14B begins on Monday morning at nine o'clock. If his paperwork is clean, he has nothing to fear. If it isn't... he had better start looking for an attorney who specializes in federal securities fraud."
May you like
I turned and walked out into the crisp morning sunshine, leaving my sister sitting alone in the booth, staring down at the paper with trembling hands.
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