Still imagines we're back at the old firm. Gets turned around. Dad, sit yourself down. You're making a fool of yourself up there. I didn't sit.
I left the bar behind me and moved to the center of that floor, planting myself directly beneath the chandelier where the light fell without mercy. From there, I turned to face the partner's table. These were men who had erected real things, men who understood the true gravity of serious capital. "Gentlemen," I said, my voice not wavering.
"My son has been telling you my mind was failing, that I needed someone to watch over me, that the wealth he displayed was self-made. I reached into my pocket and produced the burner phone, raising it slowly the way a prosecutor lifts an exhibit before the bench. "Here is what is actually true. In 10 years, my son has not earned a single honest dollar. Everything he's been calling his own capital is mine.
My decades of savings, my labor. He sold my Roanoke home out from beneath my feet to fund that penthouse. Every dollar behind tonight's performance was extracted from a man still raw with grief over his dead wife. Liar. The word hadn't fully left my mouth before Ingrid was upright, ejected from her seat by something that had nothing to do with reason.
The careful, polished front she'd worn through the entire evening, the composed and sculpted version of herself, herself she'd so deliberately assembled, had shattered. In its place was something backed into a corner. "Shut your mouth," she shrieked.
"You have no idea what you're talking about. You're unwell. Declan, call the doctors. Get Dr. Fitch down here.
Have this man removed. I let my gaze travel to her unhurried. What I offered wasn't anger. What I offered was worse. It was the settled, thorough disappointment of a man whose mind is already made up.
It knocked the air out of her. "Dr. Fitch won't be walking through that door, Ingrid," I said. "The fabricated psychiatric evaluation he authored to have me locked away reached the state medical board's desk this afternoon."
A copy went to the district attorney as well. The color fell out of her face the way light drops out of a room when a switch is thrown sudden and total. Both hands searched blindly for the table's edge. Declan swung toward her, then back to me, his head moving in short, rigid little arcs. That's impossible.
There's no way you pulled that off. You can barely manage your own phone. I gave him a smile. Nothing warm in it. Nothing that forgave.