Chapter 13: Camille's Price

I read the petition standing in my father's kitchen at four in the morning, with the process server's headlights still fading on the wall.

Camille sat at the long table with a towel round her shoulders and did not speak.

Eli stood at the window with his phone to his ear, waking people up.

The petition was thirty pages long.

It said I had been medicated since the funeral.

It said I had made "irrational financial decisions."

It said I had frozen "every family account" in a fit of paranoia at a dinner party.

It named Bryce Danner as the person best placed to manage my affairs.

It asked the court to put him in charge of the Prescott Group until I was well.

At the bottom was a date.

A hearing, in nine days.

"He's good," Camille said, to nobody. "He always writes it so it sounds like love."

I put the pages down.

"You're staying here until it's light," I said. "Then you'll say all of it again, on a recorder."

"I told you. I need the immunity."

"And I told you I don't make promises in kitchens."

She looked at me for a long moment.

Her mascara had dried in dark tracks.

Without the bun and the emerald dress she was just a woman of twenty-nine who had bet on the wrong man.

"What do I get, then?"

"Nothing I can promise," I said. "A prosecutor will hear that you came in before you were caught."

"And if I walk out?"

"Then go back to Hudson Street and wait for Bryce to decide what you are."

"He's already decided."

"Then you know where you stand."

She laughed, short and wet, and put her face in her hands.

At nine, my lawyer arrived with a young woman carrying a recorder and a stack of blank forms.

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