My car turns onto my street and stops short.
There's a crowd on the sidewalk. Cameras. Phone lights already up and recording. For a second I think there's been an accident. Then I see the roses.
Ninety-nine of them, laid out in a fan shape on the pavement outside my building, red against gray concrete. Dereck stands in the middle of it in a charcoal suit, hair combed just so, a velvet cushion balanced on one palm. On the cushion, a ring. My ring. The one from thirty years ago, the one he pulled out at the reunion, the one I never wanted to see again.
Across the street, three photographers lean against a parked van, lenses already up. Not paparazzi who got lucky. Invited.
I sit in the back seat for a second longer than I need to. My driver glances at me in the mirror.
"Ma'am?"
"It's fine," I say. "Open the door."
I step out. Flashes go off immediately, a soft popping storm of light. I don't flinch. I've stood in worse rooms than this.
Dereck sees me and his whole face lifts, like a curtain going up. "Carolina."
I walk toward him. Slow. Unhurried. Someone in the crowd whispers something about the reunion video already being everywhere. I ignore it.
He holds the cushion out with both hands, like an offering. "I know last night didn't go the way I hoped. But I'm not giving up on us. I never have."
I look at the roses. Ninety-nine of them. Counted, I'm sure, by someone on his staff.
I pick up the bouquet from the top of the pile — the one meant for the cameras, the one with the ribbon — and I throw it at his chest.
It hits him square in the sternum. Petals burst loose and scatter across his shoes, across the velvet cushion, across the sidewalk. A few stick to his lapel. Somebody across the street laughs before they catch themselves.
Dereck's smile cracks at the edges but he holds it. Practiced. Even now.
I step close enough that the cameras can't catch what I say. Close enough that only he can hear it.
"I know about the pendant," I say quietly. "I know it's fake. I know where the real one is."
Something moves behind his eyes. Just a flicker. A half-second where the performance drops and I see something underneath it — not quite guilt, but close enough to it that I know I've hit something true.
Then it's gone. He blinks, and his face rearranges itself into wounded confusion, the same look he probably practiced for the divorce papers thirty years ago.
"What pendant?" he says. Then, before I can answer, "Oh — your mother's stone. God, Carolina, I don't know. Halo must have taken it. She always liked pretty things. I never — I had no idea."
I look at him for a long moment. Long enough that he starts to shift his weight.
"You put it in her coffin," I say. "I don't need you to admit it. I already know."
"Carolina—"
"I'm going to get it back," I say. "Whatever has to be opened to do that. I don't care."
I turn and walk toward my building. Behind me I hear him say my name again, softer this time, for the cameras. I don't turn around. The roses are still scattered across the sidewalk when the elevator doors close.
---
I call my attorney from the suite before I've even taken off my coat.
"I need a legal team on an exhumation," I say. "Brooklyn. Greenwood Cemetery. I have a provenance report and estate documentation proving ownership of a piece of property that was buried without my knowledge or consent."
There's a pause on the line, the kind lawyers make when they're recalculating a fee. "That's... an unusual request, Ms. Greene."
"I'm aware."
"We'll need the Sotheby's report, your mother's estate papers, and a judge willing to sign off. It won't be fast."
"Make it fast."
It takes four days. I sit through two conference calls, sign eleven documents, and answer the judge's questions myself when he asks for a personal affidavit — a woman on a screen, older now, telling a stranger in robes about a pendant her mother pressed into her hand before she died. He grants the order without much hesitation. The provenance chain is clean. Mason Reed's report is airtight. There is nothing left to argue with.
Wes calls the morning the order comes through.
"It's done," he says. "Court authorized the exhumation. Crew's lined up for Thursday."
"Good."
"There's something else." A pause, the kind he takes when he wants me to be ready before he says it. "Someone at the funeral home tipped off Cali. She knows it's coming."
I look out the window at the city, gray under a low sky.
"Then she'll be there," I say.
"Probably."
"Fine," I say. "Let her come."
I hang up and touch the space at my throat where the fake pendant used to sit. Empty now. Waiting.
Thursday isn't far.
