The Dragon Mother Returns: Taking Back Everything That Belongs to My Daughter novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Vault

The private bank sits on Fifty-Seventh Street, in a limestone building my grandmother bought in 1968 because a man inside it had refused her a loan.

On Monday at 9:35, I walked in through its brass doors.

Matthias walked in behind me and stopped dead.

The lobby was all green marble. There was a doorman in white gloves and a chandelier the size of a car.

"This is a bank?" he whispered.

"Yes."

"Where do they keep the money? In the ceiling?"

"Behave."

There were six clients in the leather chairs, waiting with coffee in real cups.

At the long marble counter, a young man in a gray suit was laying out papers in a neat fan.

He had Lionel's lawyer's haircut and the same cufflinks.

Next to him stood the bank's president.

I'd hired him twenty years ago, when he had one suit and a cold.

He looked up from the papers because the lobby had gone quiet.

I walked up to the counter.

"Good morning," I said.

The young banker smiled at me professionally. "Ma'am, there's a line."

"I don't stand in lines in this building."

The president was staring at the healed cut through my eyebrow, and then at my eyes.

His face went slowly gray.

"You can't be," he said.

"Look at me. Properly."

He did.

"In 2011, your son was born eight weeks early in Boston," I said. "You were in my office when your wife called. You cried. I sent the company plane to fly her mother up from Charleston, and you paid me back with a fruit basket I'm still angry about."

His hand came up over his mouth.

"It had a pineapple in it," I said. "For a premature baby."

"Mrs. Oberlin."

"Yes."

The young banker looked from one of us to the other.

"I'm sorry, what is happening? We have a transfer releasing at ten. My client is Mr. Lionel Keel."

"Your client," I said, "is moving eleven million dollars out of my daughter's trust and into his daughter's pocket."

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