He signed.
He signed the share-transfer instrument. He signed the trust assignment. He signed the consent for the family office. He signed the deed package on the Greenwich estate that outside counsel had drafted, which I happened to have on me, which I happened to have had ready for some time. He signed each of them with the gold Montblanc he had used to sign every document of consequence in his life.
When he was done, he set the pen down with the cap pointing at me, and his hand stayed flat on the desk because it didn't have the muscle to go anywhere else.
Margot understood, in pieces, what she had just watched.
She came at the desk.
She tried to grab the stack of pages off the leather. Her fingernail caught on the top sheet and tore an inch into the cover memo before Cass got to her. He didn't have to use force; he just stood between her and the desk, and the size of him in front of her decided it.
She backed off the desk. She looked at me.
She had been the woman pointing at the door of the Beacon Hill house this same week. She had been the woman whose voice had carried over the foyer marble to my back as I walked out.
She put her knees down on the rug.
She had never put her knees down on a rug in her life. They didn't bend right. She landed unevenly and had to catch herself on one palm.
"Wren."
She used my name like it had a weight.
"Wren — baby. I know. I know I was — I was wrong. We were both wrong. We were so wrong. We were panicking and we were stupid and I — I did this, I let your father do this, I let that — that girl into this house, she lied and we believed her and you — you grew up in our house, you grew up in our arms, you — "
She started crying. Not the way Annie cried. The way a person cries who has not done it on purpose since adolescence.
"Please give it back to him. Please. We can fix this. We can be a family again. We are a family."
Family.
Funny word.
"Too late."
I looked down at her.
"You decided what we were the morning you put me out."
I turned. I took Cass's elbow. The signed pages were on the desk. The folder was in his other hand. We started toward the door.
Margot got off the rug.
She came across the office at me with her face wrong, both hands open, not Margot Cabot Winthrop in any sense the city had ever known.
"I'll kill you — "
Cass put me behind him with one arm and put his other hand on the front of her throat and she came off the floor.
She kicked. Her face went the color of something dying. Her pearls hit her own collarbone.
"Cass."
He looked at me.
"Put her down."
He did. He set her down on the rug exactly the way you set down a glass. She landed on her side, both hands at her own throat, coughing in long ugly tearing coughs.
She looked up at us with the eyes of a person who had finally figured out what was in the room with her.
We left the office. The C-suite express elevator came for us within thirty seconds. The doors closed on the sound of Margot's coughing and Teddy's silence and the harbor view I had imagined myself standing at for sixteen years.
Within thirty days, the Holdings re-org would close, the building would unbolt the brass Winthrop Holdings off the lobby wall, and the new monogram would go up in matte black.
Winthrop Holdings was Locke Capital Partners now.
The first thing I did was buy back the Greenwich house.
The Holdings sale package had pulled it onto the open block at a fire-sale clearing price; I instructed Locke Capital's family-office arm to bid on it and close in cash by Tuesday. By Wednesday morning my key fit the front door again.
The housekeeper, Maria, who had taught me the names of every kind of fork, was waiting for me in the foyer with the rest of the staff in two rows. None of them were looking up. The new owner was somebody they had watched grow up and somebody they had watched get evicted and there wasn't a script for that in the Greenwich employee handbook.
I sent most of them home with three months' severance and a letter on Locke Capital paper. Maria I kept. The groundsman I kept. The chef who used to make me cinnamon toast at five in the morning when I was nine and couldn't sleep, I kept.
I had my old room put back exactly the way it had been at sixteen. The Choate flag on the wall, the books on the right shelf, the watercolors of the Vineyard above the desk. My bed.
Annie's room — which had been mine before her, which had been turned over three weeks ago — I had emptied. Down to the carpet pad. The Oscar de la Renta gown, the one she had worn at the foyer, came out with the first load. I had it bagged and dropped at a Goodwill in Roxbury without a tag.
Cass came home after dark. He shed his suit in the mudroom like a man who'd worn one before, found the pegboard of Maria's aprons next to the laundry, took down a navy chambray one, tied it on, and went into the kitchen.
The man with the reputation east of the Charles, in apron strings, plating roast chicken at the eight-burner Wolf.
I sat at the head of the mahogany dining table and watched him bring out two plates.
"How's the company?" he said.
"Buttoned. The HR review goes through next week. I'm going to keep about thirty percent of the senior team. The rest can go to Bain or wherever."
I had cleaned house at Locke Capital — formerly Winthrop Holdings — the way I had been taught to set a table, with placement and intention. The Beacon Hill loyalty network was out. A handful of the younger partners who had spent ten years stepping aside for sons-in-law moved up.
"Sheffield's still pushing," Cass said. He cut a roast potato in half with the side of his fork. "Charles Sr. is calling around the lenders, trying to put together a hostile play on Locke. He thinks if he can squeeze us before close he'll have leverage to walk Bash out of the situation."
"Bash's leg?"
"It'll set wrong. He'll walk on the cane."
"Good."
I put my fork down.
"Cass. The Sheffields. I want them too."
He looked up.
He had a way of looking at me, when I asked for things, that I had stopped trying to describe to myself. It was the way somebody looks at a horizon line they're about to walk to.
"Done."
After dinner we sat outside on the white-painted swing on the back lawn. I had used that swing from age six. The chains still squeaked at the same pitch.
"What's next," he said.
"The Pruitts. They're not done yet."
I was leaned against his shoulder.
"They sold me once. They went back and tried to get a second draw on me through Annie. People like that don't get to keep walking around."
He didn't say anything. He pulled me a little closer with the arm that wasn't on the chain.
The sky over the Sound was every color a Connecticut night gets. The lights of the houses along the shore were on. Somewhere down the lane somebody was running a leaf blower at nine at night because they could.
I had thought, once, that I had lost everything.
I had only walked out of the house I was supposed to walk out of.
The room I was supposed to be in turned out to be a different room. A room where I decided what happened to people, including myself.
Cass was not my brother. He had never been my brother.
He was my most loyal knight, and the sharpest weapon I had ever owned, and the only man I had ever loved.