Chapter 7: The Night Eleanor Came
Daniel's person was a woman named Petra who sat in a grey sedan outside Cassidy's building and looked, to anyone passing, like someone waiting for a parking space.
Cassidy knew she was there.
It helped.
She had eaten dinner alone — soup, toast, a glass of water — and was sitting at her kitchen table with the server summary spread in front of her when her building's front desk called at 8:47 p.m.
"Ms.
Marsh?
There's a woman here asking to see you.
She says she's family."
Cassidy closed her eyes for one second.
"Send her up," she said.
Eleanor arrived at her door four minutes later.
She was dressed as she always dressed — carefully, expensively, in a way that communicated that she had never needed to worry about the cost of things.
Her hair was set.
Her posture was exact.
She looked at Cassidy's damp hair and the soup bowl still on the table and said nothing about either.
"May I come in?" she said.
Cassidy stepped back from the door.
Eleanor walked in and stood in the centre of the living room.
She did not sit.
She looked around the apartment — the clean lines of it, the art on the walls, the floor-to-ceiling windows — with an expression that Cassidy had seen many times and had once, foolishly, tried to earn.
"I want to talk to you without attorneys," Eleanor said.
"Then talk," Cassidy said.
Eleanor turned to face her.
"You're going to destroy my son."
"Your son tried to take my daughter."
"He was protecting his interests.
You were going to cut him out entirely.
He had a right—"
"He had a right to nothing that wasn't his," Cassidy said.
"The shares were never his.
The company was never his.
My daughter is not an asset."
Eleanor's jaw tightened.
"You don't understand what it is to watch your child lose everything."
"I'm about to," Cassidy said.
"I'm watching my child's name on a forged document that your attorney drafted before she was even born."
Eleanor looked away.
Toward the window.
"I want you to withdraw the referral," she said.
"No."
"I will make this very public.
I have journalists who owe me favors.
I will give them a version of this story that makes you look like a vindictive ex-wife who fabricated evidence to destroy a family."
Cassidy looked at her.
"You'll do that."
"If I have to."
"Eleanor." Cassidy walked to the kitchen counter.
She picked up a folder — a thin one, three pages — and held it out.
"Before you decide, read the first page."
Eleanor did not move.
"Please," Cassidy said.
The word was not soft.
It was the word you use when you are offering someone a choice they will not get again.
Eleanor took the folder.
She opened it.
Read the first page.
Her hand tightened on the paper.
The first page was a transcript.
A phone call between Eleanor and Doyle Fitch, recorded on a line that Fitch had not known was monitored, from eleven months ago.
In it, Eleanor described — in her own voice, in her own words — the psychiatric evaluation strategy, the trust structure, and what she called "the window" — the third trimester, when Cassidy would be least able to respond.
Eleanor set the folder on the coffee table.
She did not sit down.
But something in her posture changed — the precise, expensive certainty of it — like a building whose foundation has shifted a quarter inch.
Still standing.
But different.
"How long have you had that," she said.
"Long enough," Cassidy said.
"You could have used it at the house last night."
"I wanted you to come here," Cassidy said.
"I wanted you to threaten me in my own home, in front of my own windows, so that when your attorney argues you were acting in good faith, I can tell the court exactly what you said to me tonight."
Eleanor looked at her for a long moment.
"You're not what Brendan told me you were," she said finally.
"No," Cassidy agreed.
"I'm not."
Eleanor picked up her bag.
She walked to the door.
Stopped with her hand on the frame — the same position, Cassidy noticed, that she herself had stood in the night before.
"My son loves you," Eleanor said.
"In his way.
Whatever that's worth."
"It's worth less than my daughter's safety," Cassidy said.
Eleanor left.
Cassidy stood in the quiet of her apartment.
Then she picked up her phone and sent Petra a single message: *She's leaving now.
Please make sure she goes.*
Three minutes later, Petra replied: *She's gone.
All clear.*
Cassidy sat back down at the kitchen table.
She put her hand on the server summary.
Beneath her palm she could feel the slight texture of the printed pages.
She thought about the transcript.
About Eleanor's voice on the recording saying *the window* like it was a reasonable word for the thing she was describing.
She thought about her daughter.
Still months away.
Still safe.
May you like
She did not cry.
But she sat there for a long time before she moved again.
