He swiped the screen with a trembling thumb. “Mother?”
“Grant, darling,” Constance’s shrill, aristocratic voice pierced the quiet room. “I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour. Are you still dealing with that ungrateful little girl? You need to call Richard Vance right now and smooth this over. I spoke to his wife, and she said Richard was quite taken aback by Elena’s dramatic exit. People from her background simply don’t understand how fragile social capital is!”
“Mother, stop,” Grant rasped, running a hand through his thinning hair.
“Excuse me? I will certainly not stop! I warned you eleven years ago, Grant! When a man marries down, he spends the rest of his life apologizing for his wife’s lack of breeding! Did you see the way she looked at me when I cleared those plates? As if I were a common scullery maid! Those steaks cost ninety dollars a plate, Grant! Children do not need dry-aged beef; it’s an absolute waste of your hard-earned money! She should have thanked me for saving you the expense!”
“Mother!” Grant yelled, his voice cracking with a raw, ugly strain that stopped Constance cold.
“Grant?” she said after a long pause, her tone turning chilly and offended. “Do not use that tone with me.”
“Elena… she didn’t take the girls to her sister’s house in Ohio,” Grant stammered, his eyes still fixed on the property deed on his laptop screen. “She didn’t go to a hotel.”
“Well, where is she? Hiding in her studio apartment pretending to work on her little clip-art projects?”
“She told me to meet her tomorrow morning at an address in Great Falls,” Grant said, his throat bone-dry. “I just looked up the tax records. It’s a fourteen-million-dollar estate. And the trust name on the deed… it has her initials.”
Constance burst into a sharp, brittle laugh that had no humor in it.
“Oh, please! Grant, really? You can’t possibly be that gullible! She probably rented an Airbnb for a night with your joint credit card just to intimidate you! She’s playing games, Grant. She wants you to chase her. She wants you to beg for forgiveness because she knows she has nothing without you! Tomorrow morning, you and I will drive out there together. We will pick up our granddaughters, and we will set firm, non-negotiable boundaries with that girl once and for all.”
Grant looked down at the screen. The transfer documents bore the legal seal of Sterling & Croft—the most prestigious corporate law firm in the District. They didn’t handle Airbnbs. They handled sovereign wealth funds and Fortune 500 family offices.
“Yeah,” Grant whispered, though his stomach was churning with a cold, terrifying dread. “Tomorrow morning. We’ll go together.”
