Chapter 7 - The Desperation of Fools
Three days after Nathan’s arrest, the Portland rain returned with a vengeance, washing over the city in cold, relentless sheets.
Nathan had made bail—set at a staggering one million dollars, secured against his remaining personal retirement accounts—and had spent the last seventy-two hours holed up in a cheap business hotel near the airport. His luxury vehicles were seized by federal asset forfeiture units. His credit cards were canceled. His face was on the front page of every newspaper from Seattle to San Francisco.
I was at the *Vanguard Events* warehouse in the Industrial District, inspecting twenty crates of imported hand-blown glassware for an upcoming cancer research gala.
The heavy steel side door rattled, then swung open with a screech.
Vanessa Hart stood in the doorway.
She looked like a ghost. Her designer clothes were gone, replaced by an oversized trench coat with the collar turned up against the rain. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a messy, damp knot, and her mascara was smudged beneath her eyes.
"You need to call off your lawyer," Vanessa said, her voice shaking with a dangerous mixture of exhaustion and hysteria.
Marcus, who was standing on a forklift nearby, immediately cut the engine and stepped down, his jaw set, ready to intervene.
I raised a single hand, signaling Marcus to stay back.
"Good afternoon, Vanessa," I said, carefully setting down a crystal wine glass into its foam compartment. "You're trespassing."
"I don't care!" she cried, taking three hurried steps toward me, her heels clicking against the concrete floor. "Do you have any idea what you've done to me? NexaHealth is suing me for twenty million dollars! The SEC is freezing my assets! The FBI has been at my parents' house! I am thirty-four years old, Ava! My life is over!"
"Your life isn't over, Vanessa," I replied calmly, wiping my hands on a linen cloth. "Your career as an executive is over. There is a distinction. You will likely spend three to five years in a minimum-security federal facility, followed by several years of supervised probation. People survive prison. My father used to say that consequences are merely reality catching up with arrogance."
"You planned this!" she shouted, pointing a trembling, unmanicured finger at me. "You knew about the bid! You knew about the telemetry flaws! You could have stopped this before the gala! You could have confronted Nathan at home like a normal civilized woman!"
I laughed—a quiet, crystalline sound that echoed off the high rafters of the warehouse.
"A normal civilized woman?" I asked, taking two slow steps toward her. Vanessa instinctively recoiled, taking half a step backward. "Vanessa, you stood in my house while I was out of town. You drank my wine. You slept in the bed my father bought for my wedding. You looked at my life, my marriage, my standing in this community, and you decided it was yours for the taking. Did you consider being 'civilized' then?"
"Nathan chased me!" she wailed, tears finally cutting tracks through the grime on her cheeks. "He told me he was miserable! He told me you were cold! He told me you were an empty shell who cared more about napkin folds and seating charts than being a wife!"
"And you believed him," I said softly, "because you wanted to believe that greatness was easy. You wanted to believe that Nathan was a genius and that I was an obstacle. But Nathan never told you the most important thing about our marriage, did he?"
Vanessa sniffled, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her coat. "What?"
"Nathan didn't build his private surgical practice," I said, my voice dropping to a whisper that commanded the entire cavernous room. "I did. Nathan didn't secure the donors for the cardiac wing. I did. Nathan didn't even write his own speeches. I wrote every single word he spoke on that stage at the Benson Hotel."
Vanessa stared at me, her mouth slightly open, the realization washing over her like dirty water.
"You think Nathan was the sun," I continued, "because I spent fifteen years holding the mirror that reflected the light onto him. You fell in love with a reflection, Vanessa. And when you shattered the mirror, you found yourself standing in the dark with a cowardly, narcissistic fraud who couldn't even keep his hands off you in a public airport."
Vanessa sank down onto the edge of a wooden crate, her head in her hands, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs.
"I have nothing left," she wept. "They took my car. They took my apartment. My father won't even take my calls."
"Then you should start walking," I told her, turning my back on her and picking up another piece of glassware. "Because if you are still on this property in three minutes, Marcus will call the police, and you will spend the night in the Multnomah County Jail instead of a motel."
Vanessa didn't say another word. She pulled herself up from the crate, wrapped her trench coat tightly around her trembling frame, and shuffled out into the cold Portland rain, disappearing into the gray fog of the industrial district like smoke from an extinguished fire.
Marcus walked over, standing beside me as the heavy steel door clicked shut.
"Are you alright, Ava?" he asked quietly.
May you like
"I have never been better, Marcus," I said, holding the crystal glass up to the fluorescent light, checking for flaws. "The glass is clean. Let’s finish the inventory."
***
