Chapter 2 - The Price of My Mother's Name
Roman's car was waiting at the curb, but I remained on the chapel steps, reading the message until the words blurred. My mother's shares had been the reason my father insisted I marry Damian, the reason he refused to release my trust documents, and the reason Vivian had been promised to Roman. Now someone was suggesting that the shares had already been used for a purpose nobody had told me about.
“Do you recognize the number?” Roman asked.
“No. And I don't recognize the document.” I enlarged the photograph, trying to make out the legal language beneath my mother's signature. The image was too blurry to read the entire page, but a date near the bottom caught my attention. It was dated four months before her death.
Roman didn't take the phone from me or tell me what to think. He asked whether I wanted his attorney to examine the image. I agreed, then sent the original message to an email account my father didn't know existed. I had spent years accepting his assurances because challenging them felt like betraying the memory of my mother. That excuse no longer worked.
We went to Roman's Manhattan residence, a spacious apartment in a secured building overlooking the river. It was elegant without being comfortable, furnished in dark wood and muted colors, with very little evidence that anyone actually lived there. A housekeeper showed me to a guest suite, and Roman instructed his staff to treat it as my space rather than a room I was borrowing from him.
“I won't expect you to pretend this is a normal marriage,” he said when we were alone. “We can establish whatever arrangements make you comfortable.”
“I don't want you to think I expect you to solve my problems because I married you.”
“I don't.” He paused. “But if someone has used my name to force you into a transaction, that becomes my concern as well.”
I wondered whether that was the closest he came to kindness or simply how he understood obligations. Either way, it was more honest than the promises Damian had made me.
His attorney, Margaret Ellis, arrived that afternoon with a secure laptop and a list of documents needed to investigate the trust. She was a compact woman in her fifties who wore reading glasses on a chain and had little patience for dramatic explanations. After reviewing the photograph, she asked me to sign authorization allowing her to request records directly from the trust administrator.
“If your father is withholding documents, we need to establish whether he's entitled to do so,” she explained. “And if the shares were pledged, we need the original instrument, not somebody's photograph of a signature page.”
I signed.
Margaret also discovered that my father had recently submitted a request to extend his authority over the trust beyond my thirtieth birthday. My birthday was six weeks away. The request claimed that I was entering a period of financial instability and needed continued supervision.
I stared at the screen. “He filed this before the wedding?”
“Three weeks ago,” Margaret said. “Whether the request is valid depends on the trust terms and the court's review. But the timing is certainly worth examining.”
I felt an old, familiar embarrassment, the kind that came from realizing someone had been making decisions about me while telling me I was too immature to make them myself. My father hadn't simply underestimated me. He had been preparing to keep me dependent.
When Roman offered to have his security team identify the sender of the message, I hesitated. I didn't want a stranger's warning to become an excuse for him to take control. I told him I wanted to pursue the legal records first and would decide later whether the sender needed to be identified.
He accepted that without argument.
By evening, Damian had called seventeen times. I ignored the first sixteen. The seventeenth came through while I was reviewing the documents Margaret had sent, and I answered before I could talk myself out of it.
“Arya, thank God,” he said. His voice was controlled, but I could hear traffic in the background. “Your father won't tell me where you are. We need to talk.”
“About the wedding?”
“About what happened. Vivian was emotional, and I made a mistake.”
“You kissed her at the altar.”
“I know what I did.”
“Then why are you calling it a mistake as if you spilled wine on a tablecloth?”
He fell silent. For several seconds, I heard only the faint hum of his car. Then he said he had loved me for years and that the situation with Vivian had become complicated. He insisted the affair had begun because she was lonely and frightened, and he had been trying to help her.
“Since Christmas?” I asked.
His silence answered before he did.
“I never intended to humiliate you.”
“But you did.”
“Arya, listen to me. You know how much pressure your father has been under. Our companies are tied together. We were going to build something important.”
“You mean you were going to get my shares.”
“That's unfair.”
I almost laughed at the familiar accusation. Whenever I questioned Damian, he treated the question itself as the injury. I told him that any discussion about Hartwell Holdings would happen through lawyers from now on.
His voice sharpened. “You think marrying Moretti makes you untouchable? You don't know the kind of man he is.”
“No,” I replied. “But I know the kind of man you are.”
I ended the call before he could turn my answer into another argument.
For a few minutes, I sat perfectly still. I had imagined that discovering the affair would hurt most, but the call left me with something colder than heartbreak: the recognition that Damian could acknowledge the facts and still believe himself to be the injured party.
Later, Vivian sent a message asking me to meet her alone. She said she wanted to explain why she had come to the chapel and why our father had been so determined to marry her to Roman. I nearly deleted it. Then I remembered her face when Roman entered the church, and the panic beneath her practiced confidence.
I agreed to meet her the following afternoon in a public café near Madison Square Park. I would not go alone, but I also would not send Roman to speak in my place.
When I told him, he asked whether I wanted security nearby. I said yes, as long as they remained out of sight.
“You don't owe her forgiveness,” he said.
“I know.”
“Do you believe she'll tell you the truth?”
“I believe she'll tell me the part of the truth she thinks will help her.”
He considered that, then handed me a small card with Margaret's number on it. “If you need to leave, leave. You don't have to finish the conversation just because you started it.”
The next morning, Margaret called with the first official response from the trust administrator. The records confirmed that a substantial portion of my mother's shares had been used as collateral for financing connected to Hartwell Holdings. The paperwork referenced an authorization I had never seen and a guarantee bearing my father's signature.
But there was another name on the agreement.
Damian Lockwood.
May you like
I read it twice, feeling the last fragile piece of my old understanding collapse. Damian hadn't merely wanted to marry into my family. His company had already become part of the financial arrangement my father was desperate to protect.
And tomorrow, I would have to sit across from my sister and discover how much she knew.
