Chapter 8: Four Hundred Thousand

Langston stopped in the sunroom doorway.

He looked at his mother.

Then he looked at me, sitting in her white wicker chair with my coat still on.

"Four hundred thousand," he said.

"That's a lie," I said.

Rosalind sighed.

"She came in without calling. She put a paper on my table and started making demands." She touched her pearls.

"I told her I wouldn't be threatened in my own house."

"I didn't ask you for a dollar."

"Then why are you here?" Langston said.

"Ask her who she paid three years ago."

Rosalind's face didn't move at all.

The housekeeper had come up behind Langston in the hall.

She stood with a tray of cups, frozen, looking at the floor.

"Don't," Langston said to me. "Don't you drag my mother into whatever this is."

"She's already in it. She put herself in it."

"She's the only person in this family who's ever been kind to you."

I laughed.

I didn't mean to.

It came out of me.

"Kind," I said. "Ten minutes ago she called me a plain girl with no ambitions."

"Annabel." His voice dropped. "What did you come here for?"

I stood up.

I picked the loan release off the seating chart and held it out to him.

He didn't take it.

So I read it to him.

"Loan to Sorel Paper and Box. Six million dollars. Paid in full, August fourteenth. Signed, Rosalind Aldridge."

The room went silent.

Langston looked at the paper.

Then he took it from my hand and read it himself.

"August," he said.

"Two months ago," I said. "My father sold his warehouse. He owes you nothing."

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