Chapter 7 - The Cracking of the Golden Couple
Eli Vance sat on the edge of the unmade king bed in Room 412 of the boutique hotel on Market Street, his elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands.
The room smelled of stale coffee and room-service club sandwiches. Across the room, two leather suitcases sat open on luggage racks, packed with the clothes he had hastily pulled from the Elmridge house while George was asleep and Helen was at the pharmacy.
The door clicked open.
Eli didn't look up. He knew who it was. Only one person had the key card.
Clara walked in, letting her handbag drop to the carpet with a dull thud. Her eyes were red, her hair frizzy from the damp wind outside. She looked smaller than she had in her wedding dress—diminished, like a photograph that had been left out in the sun until the bright colors turned milky and washed out.
"I saw her," Clara said, her voice flat, exhausted.
Eli didn't move. "I told you not to go there."
"She’s a monster, Eli," Clara cried, stepping toward him, her hands reaching out in that habitual gesture of seeking comfort. "She’s completely cold. She looked right through me. She’s making Mom and Dad sell the house. She’s giving them two thousand dollars a month. Two thousand! That won't even cover Mom’s medications and groceries!"
Eli slowly lifted his head. His eyes were dark, shadowed with sleeplessness, and entirely devoid of the boyish adoration Clara had spent eighteen months cultivating.
"Did you know?" Eli asked.
Clara blinked, thrown off balance by the question. "Know what?"
"Did you know that Maya owned the debt on your father’s building?"
"No! Of course not! She kept it a secret—"
"Did you know your father was seven hundred thousand dollars in debt to a predatory mezzanine lender when we got engaged?"
Clara’s gaze darted toward the window, her lips pressing together into a thin, defensive line. "Daddy had some business setbacks. Everyone has setbacks, Eli! The logistics industry has been terrible since—"
"My father checked the filings this morning, Clara," Eli interrupted. His voice wasn't angry; it was tired, with that terrifying, hollow calm that signals a man has reached the end of his illusions. "Your father didn't have 'setbacks.' Your father hasn't turned a net profit in seven years. He took out the Apex Meridian loan to pay off the second mortgage on the Elmridge house, which he took out to pay for your European tour when you dropped out of design school."
"That was an educational trip!"
"And the wedding?" Eli asked, his voice rising slightly. "The eighty-thousand-dollar catering bill? The thirty-thousand-dollar floral installation? Who did you think was paying for that?"
"Daddy said—"
"Daddy didn't pay for it!" Eli shouted, standing up from the bed. "My family paid for sixty percent of it, and your father put the rest on personal credit lines that he expected my father’s trust distribution to absorb after the wedding! You used me, Clara! Your entire family used me as a financial life raft!"
Clara took a step back, her chest heaving. "I love you, Eli! How can you say that? I love you!"
"Do you?" Eli looked at her, his eyes raking over her face as if seeing the bone structure for the first time. "Because when your mother stood up at that reception and called your sister a complete failure whose birth ruined her life... you didn't look like a woman who was uncomfortable. You threw your head back and laughed. You raised your glass like someone had just scored a touchdown."
"It was a joke!" Clara screamed, the tears finally bursting forth in a flood of ugly, ragged misery. "It’s how my family talks! Maya has always been weird and cold and distant! She thinks she’s better than everyone because she has a real degree and works with computers! You don't know what it was like growing up with her, Eli! She never cared about anyone but herself!"
Eli stared at her for a long, silent moment.
"My cousin Mark has been dating Maya for eight months," Eli said quietly.
Clara stopped. The tears seemed to freeze on her eyelashes. "What?"
"Mark," Eli repeated. "He was at Table Twelve. The guy your father treated like a waiter. Mark is Marcus Vance’s senior legal counsel. He told my father that Maya has spent the last five years quietly setting up an educational fund for your future children. She had sixty thousand dollars earmarked in an irrevocable trust to make sure that if you had kids, they wouldn't have to scramble for college tuition the way she did."
Clara’s face went completely blank. Her mouth slackened. "She... she did what?"
"She never told you, did she?" Eli said, letting out a dry, bitter laugh. "Of course she didn't. Because she knew you’d try to cash it out early to buy a Range Rover. Maya was protecting you from across the room while you were sharpening knives to use on her in public."
He reached over to the nightstand, picked up his leather wallet and his car keys, and slipped them into his trouser pocket.
"Where are you going?" Clara asked, pure panic tightening her vocal cords.
"I'm going to my father’s office," Eli said.
"To tell him to restore the trust?"
Eli looked at her from the doorway of Room 412. There was no hatred in his face. There was only the profound, unbridgeable distance between two people who had realized they were total strangers.
"No," Eli said. "To ask him for the name of a good annulment attorney. And to apologize for being stupid enough to think that pretty manners could cover up a rotten heart."
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The heavy fire door clicked shut behind him, leaving Clara standing alone on the beige carpet of the hotel room, the silence pressing down on her ears until she could hear the ragged, panicked rhythm of her own breathing.
***
