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My cell phone vibrated with an incoming call. Laughter popped out of me. “Eli, is that you?” I sauntered toward my phone in the living room. “Are you watching me, lover boy? Or can you just feel how much Idetest you?”
My own voice came out snarled and strange. Who the fuck was this person? I was in the privacy of my own home, sure, but even in this space I didn’t just open up like this. I didn’t saunter. I didn’t snarl.
I had never sauntered or snarled.
Ever.
A New York-based number stared back at me. I answered it right before it switched to voicemail. “Hello?”
“Ms. Margulis-Rossberg. This is Harris from Liddon & Wenchell Law.”
I pressed a hand to my chest. I’d been waiting for this call. “Oh my God. Thank you so much for calling me back.” I’d been so busy smashing vases and talking back to an invisible Eli that I forgot about the very outcomes I awaited from all my plotting and scheming.
Harris wasn’t my divorce lawyer. No, he was in a different specialty altogether. He was helping me craft my escape route.
I was ready to do more that saunter and snarl. I wanted to jump ship. I wanted the fuck out.
“I’d love to hear more about your particular circumstances,” Harris said, his no-nonsense voice a strange balm to my wild and free feelings.
“Well, how can I put this?” I laughed as I tipped my head back to look at the ceiling. “I’m getting ready to do something very contentious. I’m getting ready to burn every bridge I ever walked across.” I sucked in a breath. “I want to violate an NDA I signed when I was eighteen years old.”
Harris hummed. “And who was the NDA with?”
“My parents.”
“Pertaining to…?”
I swallowed a knot in my throat. Tears had arrived, despite my attempts to keep them at bay. “My brother. His death, specifically. They deny the facts around his departure, let’s say. I agreed to remain silent and signed the contract. But I’m done. I can’t.” I shook my head, swiping away the tears that had fallen. "I need to violate this NDA, and I want to share the truth of his death with the world. I need to, for my own sanity and to honor his memory.”
Harris cleared his throat. “Yeah. Well, the good news is—you have options. But you’ll need to prepare to pay for them. Depending on the terms of the NDA, breaking it could cost you dearly.”
“I’m prepared to pay any amount necessary,” I said. “My brother committed suicide, and I’m ready to tell the world.”
***
The truth was simple.
Shit happened. To everyone.
What mattered was how you alchemized it. How you twisted, reshaped, and turned the outcome into something that served you, as opposed to sucked you dry.
That’s what I was working on. Alchemy, pure and simple. I prowled the halls of the condo, shedding the skin of my old, compliant self. I was hellbent on finding a different future. For a different self. A Cora that had always been inside of me, just waiting for her chance to emerge.
I watched the headlines, keeping tabs on the Fairchilds, Eli, my parents. We were the hottest news item in the tabloids, so it was easy to catch any cough or smirk whenever they stepped into public. The world was fascinated by the Fairchilds’ meteoric rise and flaming descent.
But the world didn’t know what was coming. The Fairchilds weren’t the final spectacle.
I worked, worked, worked in a way I never had before. I knew all the steps ahead of me. The calculated risks. How much money it would cost. The exact nature of my subversion.
I was done being a white rose in an unhappy bouquet. My family had done nothing but sabotage my attempts at happiness and normalcy. They’d forced me to fit their mold from the beginning. When I was seven, I’d shown an interest in drawing. My mother had reviewed one of the drawings I’d brought home, tutted, and thrown it out.
“Making art doesn’t make you money, my dear,”she’d told me, patting my head. “It’s a commodity to be enjoyed, to make money from. Your father will explain more.”
Maybe that was where this had all begun. The thumping behind my ribs. The complacency. The cooperation. Chris and I grew up with a desperate need to fit in. For our parents’ approval. It was the one thing they wouldn’t give us.
Not even after three decades of giving them what they wanted.
I prepared myself to return to my main home on the Upper West Side. The actual home I’d once shared with Eli. Mylegal residence.I wasn’t going to call a truce or cooperate. No, I had a laundry list of tasks that needed completed. This was merely step ten of fifty.
