I couldn’t answer, so I nodded.
“I told her not to involve you—the chance of you looking like an accomplice was too high—but when you asked for the charity as a contingency for returning … well, there was no talking her out of it. She tried to tell me—her accountant, for Pete’s sake—that she would fix it all.” He scoffed. “But I thought you should know that her attempts to keep you away from the charity wasn’t strictly for her purposes. It was to protect you. Even firing you, I believe, was to try to separate you from the company and her mess. The pressure had mounted, and we all knew it was coming. Only difference is, she didn’t know what was coming, nor did she know how bad it would be.”
Protect me. She was trying to protect me. The words were unbelievable, even in thought. Unfathomable.
But they didn’t shock me in that disbelief. Because if ever my mother did protect me, it would be through abuse.
The lawyer slid another folder in Roland’s direction, perhaps to get him on track.
“Oh, yes.” He opened it up and rifled through the papers inside. “And so, the state of the company. As of this morning, your mother has given you the entirety of her shares of Bower Bouquets, fifty-one percent.”
Shock bolted me to the chair. “What?”
“Had she not, the board would have insisted. They might have bought her out, broken up the shares, taken the control from a Bower, and your mother would never allow that. So she has gifted them to you. Franklin here is drawing up the paperwork.”
At his introduction, Franklin spoke, though his words came from what felt like a very great distance, “Miss Bower, the shares are yours to do with as you wish. The board has already requested a meeting, and if you’d like, I can accompany you. I suspect there will be quite a lot of talk on what’s going to be sold and how the company will be turned around …”
I heard nothing else, my horizon shifting, weighted on one end by surprise as the dogma of my upbringing shot into the air and away. Everything I knew. Everything this company was.
Everything it could someday be.
I could not parse it. The information tumbled and jumbled around in my brain like laundry in a dryer set too hot.
“… I’m sure you can imagine everyone is anxious to get things moving again,” Franklin was saying. “This company needs a head, a leader. We can limp along while it’s sorted out, but the sooner we get you into that boardroom, the better.”
“And what about Mother?” My voice was rough, unrecognizable. “How will she survive?”
“Well,” Franklin said, “she’s home now, and she’ll stay there for some time. Your mother isn’t without investments. She’ll have to call those in—her houses, her retirement funds and stocks, anything we can liquidate—to pay back what she embezzled from the shareholders.”
“What’s the total?”
A pause. “Just shy of twenty million.”
My lungs filled, my gasp audible. But I was suffocating.
“Try not to worry yourself with that,” Roland attempted to comfort me. “This was her choice. She had many, so many opportunities to set things right, but she didn’t. She put herself here. And now you have a chance to save the company.”
But I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to speak, let alone save our crippled and overextended company. But I sat and listened as they rolled through lingering details. When it was all done, we stood and shook hands, and I left that boardroom a shell.
I stepped into the silent remains of the company. It was our kingdom in ruin, laid to waste by my mother.
And I was queen of the ashes.
29
Legacy
MAISIE
I didn’t know how long I had been standing on the stoop of my mother’s house.
When I’d left Bower, I’d walked, so lost in thought that I looked up and found myself on the subway, nearly at Christopher Street. In a haze, I exited when the doors opened and wandered up Hudson and toward her house. And I hadn’t stopped, not until I was standing here, in front of her door, without a plan or a purpose or a thought.
James didn’t open the door on my approach, which struck me as odd in itself until I realized he’d likely quit or been let go. I wondered if I should knock or ring the bell, having never come to the house when I didn’t reside here. The key was in my purse, but it somehow felt criminal to enter a house where I wasn’t welcome with a key I shouldn’t have.
Without expecting a result, I reached for the doorknob and turned, shocked when met with no resistance. Instead, the door creaked open, casting a long rectangle of light in the otherwise dark room.
I stepped in, confused and on alert.
It was too dark for daytime, unnaturally dim for a cloudless day.
It was too quiet, and my mind ran away with thoughts of finding her hurt, finding she’d hurt herself. Or worse.
But I closed the door, the sound of my heels echoing too loud.
“Mother?” I called, moving through the entryway and toward her office.
Things were untidy—a pair of toppled-over shoes next to the writing desk, which was littered with letters. Her designer bag lay on the floor on its side, the contents spilling onto the parquet.
“Hello?” My pulse picked up as I approached her office doors, which were cracked only a sliver.
I laid my damp palm on the unlatched doors and pushed.
The curtains were drawn, so heavy that only splinters of light came through. But the small, round window in the pointed eave cast a column of light into the room, just enough to see the visage of my mother, sitting in a chair in front of her grand desk, glass of scotch hanging delicately from her hand and the bottle at her bare feet.
“So you’ve come to gloat.” Her voice cut through the silence like an arrow.
I would have been hurt had I not been so relieved to find her alive. Though on inspection, I couldn’t imagine Evelyn Bower’s ego ever consenting to take her own life.
“No. I’ve come to ask why.”
She brought the crystal glass to her lips, tipping it until it was empty. And then she stood, moving to the stand where more glasses waited. “Why what, exactly?”
When she turned, a second glass was in her hand. And she made her way to sit once more before pouring a finger of scotch into both, extending one to me.
Dumbfounded, I accepted it. She nodded to the chair next to her, and I sat.
For a moment, we sat in silence, facing that opulent desk and the history of our family on the wall and mantel behind it.
The grand Victorian mantel held a dozen gilded picture frames marking Bowers through the generations. Faded wedding pictures in black-and-white vignette. My great-grandmother and her sister at a farm in the forties, cheeks high and smiling. A formal portrait of my grandmother, grandfather, and my mother and aunt as babies. A wedding photo of my parents. A baby picture of me.
But on the wall hung a massive painting of my grandmother, the portrait grand and stern and commanding. She sat in a stately chair surrounded by bouquets in shocks of color—every color in the world, I’d thought when I was a little girl. But the thing that always struck me was the ghost of a smile she wore like a crack in her mask. It was the only warmth, the only humanity in the imposing painting, and I always wondered where the rest of that smile was. Who had seen it and who had wiped it away.