“Claire,” he says, “I made mistakes.”
I wait.
He keeps waiting too, as if the line itself should produce my forgiveness automatically.
Finally I say, “Is that the part where I’m supposed to help you with the wording?”
His expression flickers.
“I’m trying to talk to you honestly.”
“No,” I say. “You’re trying to survive honestly for five minutes.”
He looks away, then back.
“You don’t understand what my mother did. She destroyed everything.”
The sentence lands, and in it is the final confirmation of what Margaret knew all along.
Even now, with the affair exposed, the estate lost, the company gone, he frames himself as the injured party. Not because he cannot see the wreckage he caused. Because he genuinely believes accountability is something done to him by less loving people.
I fold my arms against the evening chill.
“She didn’t destroy everything,” I tell him. “She documented it.”
He exhales sharply.
“You think you can run Caldwell Industrial? That board will eat you alive.”
“Then I’ll learn to bite back.”
He stares at me.
Maybe because the sentence surprises him.
Maybe because it doesn’t sound like the woman he spent years editing into softness.