Chapter 4 - The Ledger of Blood
"Fix what, Dad?"
My father stood on the doormat, his hat in his hands, shifting his weight from one foot to the other like a truant schoolboy summoned to the headmaster's study.
"Maya, don't do this through the door," he pleaded, his voice muffled by the carpeted hallway. "The neighbors. Please. Let me sit down with you for five minutes. Just five minutes."
I looked at him for a long beat. Arthur Henderson had never raised his voice to me in his life. But he had also never raised a finger to stop his wife from skinning me alive with her words. In many ways, his gentle, cowardly silence had cut deeper than Evelyn’s venom.
I slipped the chain off the brass latch and swung the door open. "Five minutes."
He stepped inside, taking off his wet coat with exaggerated care. He looked around my flat—the tidy bookshelf, the framed prints of Lisbon and Tokyo, the quiet, immaculate peace of a home built entirely without his family's interference. He had never visited my apartment before. In the three years I had lived here, my parents had always claimed the forty-minute drive from Cobham was "too much traffic for an evening."
"It's nice," he murmured. "You've made it very nice."
"You have four minutes and thirty seconds, Dad."
He swallowed hard, sitting down on the edge of the gray fabric armchair as if afraid he might stain it. "Your mother is beside herself, Maya. She's in bed with a migraine. The doctor had to be called."
"Did he prescribe an apology?" I asked, leaning against the kitchen counter, my arms folded across my chest.
"You don't understand the pressure she's under," Arthur said, his hands clasping and unclasping in his lap. "The entire family is turning on her. Greg called her a thief on the phone twenty minutes ago. Sarah is demanding to know why Chloe's family was booked into the presidential suite when Greg paid five hundred pounds more than Chloe did. The whole thing is coming apart."
A cold, razor-thin smile touched my lips. "Ah. So that’s what this is about."
"What?"
"The spreadsheet," I said softly. "The spreadsheet Mark and Chloe mocked at the table. Do you know what was on page four of that spreadsheet, Dad?"
He looked blank. "The room assignments?"
"The financial reconciliation," I said, walking over to my desk and picking up a printed sheet of paper. I dropped it into his lap. "Read the third column."
Arthur picked up the sheet with trembling fingers. His eyes scanned down the numbers, moving from the resort costs to the individual contributions.
"Evelyn told Greg that his room cost three thousand two hundred pounds," I explained, my voice clinical and merciless. "She told Sarah her room was two thousand eight hundred. She told Mark his share was three thousand. Do you know what the actual wholesale rate was for those rooms, Dad?"
Arthur didn't answer. His mouth hung slightly slack.
"Greg's room was two thousand one hundred. Sarah's was eighteen hundred. Mark's was two thousand. Your wife overcharged her own siblings and extended family by over four thousand five hundred pounds."
Arthur’s face went paper-white. "She... she wouldn't."
"She did," I said. "And do you know where that extra four thousand five hundred pounds went? It was allocated to cover Chloe and Dan’s suite completely. Chloe wasn't paying a single penny for Positano. Neither were you and Mum. You were having your flights, your suites, and your meals subsidized by Greg, Sarah, and me."
The room was suffocatingly quiet. The only sound was the clock ticking on the wall above the sink.
"She used me," I whispered, the words finally burning as they left my throat. "She had me do the contract, put my name on the legal liability, use my corporate discounts to get the lowest possible wholesale rate, and then she padded the bill so her favorite daughter could take a luxury holiday for free on her family's back. And to make sure I didn't sit at the dinner table in Positano and compare receipts with Uncle Greg, she staged that little execution on Sunday night."
Arthur stared at the paper in his hands as if it were coated in arsenic. "She told me... she told me Chloe was having financial troubles with Dan's business. She said she was handling it."
"She handled it by stealing from her brother and turning her eldest daughter into a public laughingstock." I walked to the front door and pulled it wide open. "Your five minutes are up."
"Maya..." Arthur stood up, his legs visibly shaking. "If Greg sees this... if Sarah sees this... the family will never speak to your mother again. It will destroy her standing. It will destroy the family."
"Evelyn destroyed the family on Sunday night when she took that folder out of my hands," I said, staring directly into his watery blue eyes. "She just didn't realize the folder had teeth."
"What do you want?" he asked, his voice cracking. "What will it take to stop this? She'll give you the two thousand four hundred back. I will. I'll write you a check right now from my personal account."
"Keep your money, Arthur."
The use of his first name struck him like an open-handed slap. He flinched, shrinking back into his coat.
"The escrow refund notifications have already gone out to Greg, Sarah, and Mark," I said coldly. "They will have their actual deposits back in their accounts by midnight tonight, minus the fictional markup your wife invented. As for the thirteen thousand pounds—it's already done. The booking at Villa Bellisima has been modified."
Arthur looked horrified. "Modified how?"
May you like
"You'll find out on Monday," I said. "Now get out of my home before I call the building concierge and have you escorted down the stairs."
***