Chapter 18 - The Counter-Strike
With Victoria Vance out of the house and Julian awaiting sentencing, the Vance Manor fell into the hands of the conservancy trust overseen by George, Walter, and myself.
The grand estate was scheduled to be repurposed into the Pacific Northwest Craft and Conservation Institute—a community center and vocational academy dedicated to teaching traditional timber craftsmanship, furniture design, and environmental forestry to young apprentices from working-class families. It was the ultimate poetic justice: the very mansion where Victoria had weaponized high-society snobbery would now provide free vocational training to carpenters, welders, and artisans.
Before renovations could begin, however, the property had to undergo a thorough forensic inventory.
For three weeks, George, Walter, Evelyn, and I walked through the fifty-room mansion with appraisal specialists and state archivists, documenting every piece of art, every historical document, and every family heirloom.
It was during the inventory of the main dining room that the reality of what had transpired truly sank in.
The room was cavernous and cold. The thirty-foot mahogany dining table—the table where Victoria had sat at the head, where Julian had bowed his head in cowardice, and where I had been forbidden to sit—still dominated the center of the hardwood floor.
George stood at the foot of the table, his hand resting on the polished wood.
"My father bought this table in London in 1962," George said quietly. "He thought it made us look like royalty. But all it ever did was divide people. The ones who belonged at the head, and the ones who were made to feel small at the foot."
"Tables don't divide people, George," I said, walking up beside him. "The people who sit at them do."
"What do you want to do with it, Charlotte?" Walter asked from the doorway, holding a clipboard of property disposition forms. "It's worth fifty thousand dollars at an auction house in Seattle."
I looked at the massive slab of timber. It was dark, stained with decades of heavy varnish, stiff and unforgiving.
"We don't auction it," I said.
George looked at me with curiosity. "Then what?"
"We take it apart," I replied. "The wood is old-growth Honduran mahogany—irreplaceable quality timber. We mill it down. We plane off the dark stain. And we use it to build eight smaller, round study tables for the apprentice library. Tables where nobody sits at the head. Where every student sits in an equal circle."
A brilliant, wide smile spread across George’s weathered face. "That... is the best damn idea I have heard in forty years."
The next morning, my father arrived at the manor with his heavy flatbed truck and a crew of his retired timber buddies. Watching my dad—wearing his worn flannel shirt, steel-toed work boots, and a pencil tucked behind his ear—walk through the front doors of the Vance Manor with a heavy framing saw was a sight I will cherish until the day I die.
"Hey, Char," my dad grinned, setting his heavy metal toolbox right on the polished parquet floor that Victoria had spent thousands of dollars waxing. "Where's this fancy firewood you want me to cut?"
"Right in the dining room, Dad," I laughed, kissing his rough cheek. "Take your time. Make sure the cut is clean."
For three days, the grand halls of the Vance Manor did not echo with cruel snide remarks, icy passive-aggressive barbs, or the sound of someone being humiliated. They echoed with the glorious, roaring music of carbide saw blades, the thumping of heavy work boots, the clinking of thermos coffee mugs, and honest belly laughs of men and women who worked with their hands.
We stripped the dark mahogany bare. Beneath the layers of black wax and toxic lacquer, the original wood was golden, warm, and radiant with grain that had been hidden for half a century.
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We were almost finished clearing the main floor when the building inspector, conducting a structural check of the foundation beams before the vocational academy permits could be issued, called us down to the basement.
The very basement where Victoria had ordered me to eat my dinner on the floor.
