Howard’s jaw tightened. “Do it,” he said. “Tell her. See what she says now.”
The room fell into a brittle silence, then a polite knock sounded at the door. A woman entered in heels and silk, calm in a way that seemed practiced. Lana, Seraphine’s mother and Mr. Howard’s second wife, surveyed the scene with the easy authority of someone used to smoothing storms.
“What is this?” she asked.
Howard flung the facts at her without ceremony. He told her everything Seraphine had done to Vivienne, and how he was a fool not to know his own son was being played at.
Lana listened, fingers lightly folded. She made a faint sound — not shock, but calculation. “Oh?” she said, like a woman reading a menu. “So what? We can fix this. It’s not a big deal. A sincere apology, the right faces at the right time, and the public moves on. People forget.”
Seraphine looked at Lana with pleading eyes. “You… you can do that? You can make them look like the victims?”
Lana’s smile tightened into something sharper. “Of course. We have friends. A few calls, some social proof. The merger partners mustn’t suspect instability.” She turned to Howard. “Think of the company. Think of appearances. Seraphine needs a calm hand. We can spin this.”
“If you don’t want what’s left of my goodwill,” he said at last, voice lower, “then leave this house. Leave it all. If you choose to trade a roof for a lie, be gone.”
Seraphine collapsed. She sank into a chair and began to cry. Her hands covered her face.
“It’s Vivienne’s fault,” she sobbed to Lana, when the others had turned away. “She took my son. She needs to pay.”
Lana patted her hand like a mother smoothing a fevered brow. “We’ll see about that,” she murmured. “We’ll make sure she pays.”
Adrian sat in his office, the room dark except for the city lights flickering through the window. He rubbed his temples, exhausted. Elias’s empty room haunted him the most. Every corner of that space reminded him of laughter that no longer existed. His chest tightened every time he remembered the nurse’s voice saying, “I’m sorry, Mr. Calder… he didn’t make it.”
But deep inside, something didn’t add up. Vivienne couldn’t have just vanished. He had people searching day and night, but it was as if she had disappeared from the world.