Chapter 4 - The Signal
Across the ballroom, Chairman Thurston Osgood caught my eye.
He touched two fingers to his cuff — the small signal we had agreed on that afternoon, after the closing documents were signed.
Beside him stood Bellweather’s general counsel and the forensic accountant who had spent the last six weeks quietly working through the vendor payments my husband had authorized.
I want to tell you about that afternoon, because it was the strangest few hours of my life.
I had spent the morning in a conference room signing the papers that made me the majority owner of my husband’s company, sitting across from Thurston Osgood and a table of lawyers, being entirely Celestine Ingram — sharp, precise, in command of a nine-figure transaction.
And then I had driven home to the house I shared with Lucan, and changed into a blue silk dress, and become, for a few more hours, the decorative wife he expected to bring to his party.
I remember standing in front of the mirror in our bedroom, doing up the strap of that dress, looking at my own face and thinking that in a few hours the two halves of my life, which I had kept in separate sealed rooms for three years, were finally going to collide in a hotel ballroom, and that after tonight there would be no more decorative wife.
It was like preparing to shed a skin.
Lucan came in while I was getting ready and told me not to embarrass him at the party, to smile and be pleasant to the board members, to remember that tonight was important for his career.
I said I would be on my best behavior.
It was, I suppose, the last lie I ever told him, and I told it looking right into his eyes in our bedroom mirror, and he believed it completely, because he had spent three years training me to be believable in exactly that register.
He had no idea he was looking at the woman who owned his company.
He saw only the wife he’d built.
That was the last time he would ever make that mistake.
I picked up an untouched glass of sparkling water from the table I’d stumbled into.
“Enjoy the next ten minutes,” I told Lucan.
He caught my wrist.
May you like
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you should listen carefully.”
