Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of a Void
The corridor outside the Grand Ballroom smelled of cold marble and the heavy, sulfurous exhaust of six police cruisers idling with their light bars flashing against the Fifth Avenue entrance.
Richard Vance sat on an antique bench of gilded beechwood, his hands cuffed behind his back, his rented tuxedo jacket torn along the shoulder seam where he had tried to pull away from the two federal marshals.
His patent leather shoes had lost one of their laces. His hair, so carefully pomaded three hours earlier, hung in greasy, sweat-soaked strands across his forehead.
Beside him, two female officers were conducting a search of Vanessa’s seven-thousand-dollar handbag, removing four diamond bracelets that still carried the jeweler’s inventory tags, three stolen company fuel cards, and a half-empty bottle of prescription Xanax that bore another woman's name.
Vanessa was not laughing now.
She was weeping—an ugly, snot-streaked, hysterical wail that echoed down the long marble gallery, her red silk dress bunched around her knees as she sat on the floor with her forehead pressed against the baseboard.
"I didn't know!" she shrieked to anyone who walked past. "He told me he had an inheritance! He told me his wife was a lunatic who couldn't handle money! Please, I have an elderly cat! I can't go to the county lockup!"
Olivia Vance stood ten feet away, her arms wrapped around her black velvet ribs, shivering in the air-conditioned draft.
Nobody had cuffed her.
She was simply irrelevant.
The corporate lawyers had looked at her, noted that she had never held a job, never signed an executive document, and owned nothing in this world beyond eighty-four dollars in a credit union checking account and a leased sedan whose payments were three months in arrears.
She was sixty-two years old, and she had just discovered that the son she had raised to be an autocrat was merely a common thief whose kingdom was being liquidated by a woman she had called a stray.
The heavy mahogany doors of the ballroom clicked open.
Maya walked out.
She had removed the diamond collar; it had been returned to the armored case held by her security detail. She wore a simple dark wool coat over her sea-green gown, her hair still pinned in that magnificent, severe chignon, holding Lily by the hand.
The little girl was eating a sugar cookie shaped like an anchor, completely unfazed by the uniformed officers and the flashing blue lights reflecting off the ceiling.
Richard lifted his head.
His eyes were bloodshot, the yellow whites webbed with broken capillaries, his jaw working with a desperate, rhythmic clicking sound as he struggled to find words that could reach across the five feet of marble that separated them.
"Maya," he choked out.
His voice didn't have the baritone authority of the Long Island lawn. It was the thin, rattling wheeze of an old radiator in an empty room.
"Maya... please. For Lily. You can't let them take her father. You know what it’s like to grow up without a name. You know how it hurts."
Maya stopped.
She looked down at him.
Her face was not twisted with rage. She did not sneer. She did not summon the four hundred billionaires inside the room to come out and witness his humiliation.
She looked at him with the precise, detached curiosity one might afford an overturned beetle on a gravel path.
"Her name is Lily Sterling," Maya said.
The words were very quiet. They had the density of lead shot dropped into deep water.
"She will attend the Spence School," Maya continued. "She will spend her summers on the sound. She will study navigation, she will study Greek, and she will never once in her life hear the sound of a fist hitting a kitchen table because the soup was late."
"I took care of you!" Richard wept, the tears cutting clean gray tracks through the grease on his cheeks. "I bought the groceries! I took you off the street when you didn't even know what month it was!"
Maya knelt.
She was four inches from his face—close enough that he could see the tiny white scar beside her eyebrow where the ceramic plate had cut her thirty-six hours before.
"You took a girl who was drowning," Maya whispered into his ear, "and you held her head under the water just enough to keep her from swimming away. You didn't save me, Richard. You found an amnesiac with an orchid on her neck, and you spent five years praying she would never remember who owned the sea."
She stood up.
She didn't look at Vanessa. She didn't look at Olivia, who was reaching out a trembling, liver-spotted hand toward the hem of her coat.
"Officer," Maya said to the lead marshal.
May you like
"Yes, Lady Sterling?"
"Take them through the service door," she said. "The guests are beginning to leave through the main lobby, and the smell of cheap bourbon is remarkably persistent in marble corridors."
