Chapter 5: The Right Bride
He didn’t hurt us. I think about that a lot.
He stood with his back against the door, the flashlight pointed at the floor, and he talked. The way he used to talk at the head of the dinner table. Reasonable. Patient. Like we were the ones who didn’t understand.
About the bank. About the fakes, which he called “bottles of my own wine in better clothes.” About the ten-million-dollar policy, “a precaution,” he said. About how Celeste would have “gotten sicker, slowly, the way people do when they’re unhappy,” and how it would have been a tragedy, and how Julian Kade’s money would have kept the estate alive in her memory.
“And me?” I asked.
My father looked at me like he’d honestly forgotten I’d be part of the question.
“You’d have signed the annulment,” he said. “You always do what you’re told.”
My phone was in my pocket the whole time. The call was still open. Julian heard every word. So did FBI Special Agent Dana Ruiz, whom he’d patched in from the car.
Eleven minutes later, there were boots in the barrel room, and Napa County sheriff’s deputies, and a battering ram that didn’t need to be used, because my father opened the door himself and walked out with his hands in front of him, like a man going to a meeting.
Julian came in behind them. Rain on his overcoat. He went straight past my father without looking at him and knelt on the stone floor beside me and Celeste, and he didn’t say anything at all. He just put his hand flat against my back, like he was making sure I was real.
Celeste spent four days in Queen of the Valley Medical Center. Sedatives and dehydration, nothing permanent. On the fifth day she sat across from Agent Ruiz with the ledger and gave a statement for nine hours.
My father was charged with wire fraud, the sale of counterfeit goods, insurance fraud, and attempted murder. My mother was charged as an accessory. She had co-signed the insurance application. Her handwriting was on page four. She didn’t look at me once in court.
The bank took Marlowe Estate in December. Kade Capital didn’t bid on it. Julian said he didn’t want anything my father had touched.
At the arraignment, my father’s lawyer asked the judge for leniency because his client had “never laid a hand on either daughter.” Celeste stood up in the gallery before anyone could stop her. “He didn’t need to,” she said. “He had a pharmacy.” The judge denied bail.
Celeste moved into my apartment for a while after that. She slept on my couch and cried in the shower and, for the first time since we were small, asked me what I thought about things.
The forty million dollars was frozen and returned. Julian put twelve million of it into a fund for the collectors who’d been cheated. He named it after his father.
On a cold morning in January, he came to my apartment in Sonoma with a folder.
“Annulment papers,” he said, and set them on my table. “You married me under pressure, on a lie I helped tell. You should get to undo that. I won’t contest anything.”
I looked at the papers. Little yellow arrows where I was supposed to sign. I’d seen papers like that before.
“Everyone in my life has handed me something to sign,” I said. “Nobody’s ever just asked me anything.”
He was quiet for a long time.
Then he picked up the folder, tore it in half, and set the pieces down.
“Tessa Anne Marlowe,” he said. “Not the spare. Not the placeholder. Not the wrong bride. Will you stay married to me?”
There was no veil this time. He could see my whole face.
“Ask me again in the spring,” I said. “Among the vines. Somewhere nobody’s pouring fake wine.”
He smiled. It was the first time I’d seen him smile with his whole face.
“It’s a date,” he said.
