That seems to unsettle him more than if I had engineered the entire thing. He understood betrayal. He understood manipulation. Those were languages he spoke fluently. But the idea that someone else could act decisively, brilliantly, and without his detection? That appears to wound his self-concept at the molecular level.
Lauren shifts the baby to her shoulder.
“This is vindictive,” she says.
Harlan looks at her over clasped hands.
“No,” he says. “Vindictive would have been leaving nothing for the child.”
The line slices clean.
Lauren flushes.
I feel no triumph in it, only a strange detached astonishment at the precision with which Margaret seems to be controlling this room from beyond the grave.
She saw everyone.
She measured everyone.
And now, even dead, she is distributing consequences like a queen settling accounts before the castle gates close.
Harlan slides another document toward me.
“There is also the matter of the marital residence,” he says.
Ethan’s head snaps up.
“The house?”
“Margaret purchased the deed back from Ethan’s holding vehicle eight months ago,” Harlan replies. “It is transferred to Claire Caldwell alone.”
I blink.
My house.