Chapter 8 - The Ghost of Rebecca
The silence that followed was broken by the sound of the boardroom intercom buzzing.
The receptionist’s voice came through the speaker, hesitant and thin. "Mr. Vance? Arthur Vance? Mrs. Vance is downstairs at the security desk. She says she needs to come up immediately. She says... she says it’s an emergency."
Arthur reached out with a trembling hand, pressed the speaker button, and spoke in a voice that sounded fifty years older than it had twenty minutes ago. "Send... send her up, Brenda."
Five minutes later, the double doors opened, and Eleanor Vance stepped into the room.
My mother hadn't changed. She was sixty-eight, her hair styled into a pale-gold helmet that never moved, her silk blouse pristine, her pearl necklace resting against her collarbone like an immaculate row of teeth. She had spent forty years maintaining the fiction that the Vance family was a portrait of American patrician dignity.
She looked at Arthur, slumped in his chair. She looked at Blake, weeping silently with his head on the table.
Then her eyes landed on me.
"Ethan," she said. Her voice was sharp, carrying that familiar, crisp maternal authority that used to make me stand up straight when I was a boy. "What is the meaning of this? The security guards in the lobby are whispering about federal marshals. Arthur, why aren't you handling this?"
"Eleanor," Arthur muttered without looking up. "Sit down."
"I will not sit down!" Eleanor snapped, marching toward the table, her designer heels clicking sharply against the hardwood floor. "Ethan, did you do this? Did you come back here to humiliate your brother after all these years? Have you no shame? We gave you everything! We paid for your schooling! We gave you a name that meant something in this state!"
I looked at my mother. I didn't feel anger. That was the most surprising thing: the anger had completely burned itself out over five years of seventy-hour work weeks. All that was left was an immense, chilling clarity.
"You didn't pay for my schooling, Eleanor," I said quietly. "Rebecca took out a second mortgage on her grandmother’s cottage in Camden so I could finish my mechanical engineering degree at night. You told her it was a waste of money because Blake was already in Wharton."
Eleanor blinked, her lips drawing into a thin, white line. "That was a financial decision for the family! Blake was going into management! You were working with tools!"
"And what did you do with Rebecca’s cottage after she died, Mother?" I asked.
The room went completely still. Even Blake stopped sniffling, his shoulders freezing mid-hitch.
Eleanor’s hand moved instinctively to her pearl necklace. "What are you talking about? That was an estate matter. Arthur handled the settlement with the probate court."
"Arthur handled it by forging my signature on a quitclaim deed," I said, pulling a third document from the yellow folder and setting it in front of Eleanor.
The paper was a certified forensic analysis of a real estate transfer filed in Knox County, Maine, dated three weeks after Rebecca’s funeral.
"You told me the cottage had to be sold to cover Rebecca’s end-of-life medical expenses," I told them, my voice dropping so low that Eleanor had to lean forward to hear it. "I was twenty-eight years old, grieving, working two jobs, trying to keep a five-year-old girl alive, and I trusted you. But the cottage wasn't sold to pay the hospital."
I pointed at Blake.
"The cottage was transferred to a holding company controlled by Blake. He sold it six months later to a developer for six hundred and eighty thousand dollars. And do you know what he spent that money on, Mother?"
Eleanor didn't speak. Her eyes were fixed on the forged signature at the bottom of the deed—my name, written in Blake’s distinctive, rushed, left-leaning cursive.
"He bought his first share in the country club," I said. "He bought the initiation fee, the locker room locker with his initials engraved in brass, and a vintage Rolex Submariner so he wouldn't look out of place next to the governor’s sons."
Arthur slowly lifted his head. He looked at Blake, his jaw trembling, his eyes wide with a sudden, sick disbelief.
"Blake..." Arthur whispered. "You told me Ethan consented. You brought me the papers. You told me Ethan wanted the cash to pay off Rebecca’s credit cards."
Blake didn't answer. He couldn't. He buried his face deeper into the mahogany, his shoulders shaking, a broken, pathetic figure who had run out of lies.
"You took June’s mother’s legacy," I said to Eleanor, whose face had gone completely gray, all the patrician haughtiness draining out of her like water from a cracked vase. "The cottage where Rebecca grew up. The cottage where June took her first steps on the porch. You stole it from a six-year-old girl so your golden son could play golf with real estate heirs."
"Ethan..." Eleanor reached out, her manicured fingers trembling, trying to touch my sleeve. "Ethan, we didn't know... Blake said—"
"Don't touch me," I said.
The words weren't loud, but Eleanor’s hand pulled back as if she had touched a red-hot stove pipe.
"You asked me if I have no shame," I told her. "I spent five years wondering if I was the bad son. I spent five years wondering if I should have just swallowed the insult, taken the cut on my daughter's face, and apologized to Blake so June would have grandparents who sent her birthday cards."
I looked around the room, taking in the mahogany walls, the high-rise view of the city, the frozen, terrified board members, and the three broken people who shared my last name.
May you like
"I don't wonder anymore," I said.
***
