Thursday comes in gray and cold, the kind of morning that doesn't bother with pretense. The sky sits low over Brooklyn, flat and colorless. I step out of the car at Greenwood Cemetery and feel the chill settle against my face.
The crew is already there. Six men in work gear, a backhoe idling at the service road, my attorney standing near the gate with a folder of documents under his arm. Professional. Quiet. Exactly what I asked for.
I'm wearing dark slacks and a charcoal coat. No jewelry. The hollow at my throat feels deliberate today.
My attorney walks over. 'Order's been confirmed with the site manager. We're clear to proceed.'
'Then let's proceed,' I say.
I find a spot at a measured distance from the grave and I stay there. Hands clasped in front of me. Still. The crew works without ceremony — they've done this before, they'll do it again, and they treat the work with the kind of quiet respect that makes it bearable to watch. I don't look away. I don't perform my grief for the bare trees or the low sky or the handful of bystanders who've gathered at the path's edge, phones already up.
I just wait.
I've waited thirty years. A few more minutes costs me nothing.
The screech of tires at the gate cuts through the stillness before I hear the door slam.
Cali.
She's already filming when she comes through the gate, phone held high, her face arranged into something between agony and outrage. She's dressed like she planned this — fitted black coat, hair loose, mascara that will photograph beautifully when it runs. She moves fast, almost running, and throws herself at the headstone like she's been rehearsing the angle.
'Stop!' Her voice cracks on command. 'Stop right now! You can't do this! This is my mother's grave!'
The crew doesn't stop. They've seen the order. They know their job.
Cali spins toward me. Her eyes are wet and her jaw is shaking and she is pointing at me like I'm the villain in a film she's directing in real time.
'You monster,' she says. Her voice carries. It's meant to. 'You absolute monster. She's dead. She's been dead for years and you can't leave her alone. You're desecrating her grave for a piece of jewelry. What kind of person does that?'
I don't answer. I don't move. I look at the space just past her shoulder and I breathe.
She's not talking to me. She's talking to the phones.
The work takes forty minutes. I stand through all of it. At some point Cali drops to her knees in the grass beside the stone, one hand pressed to her heart, still filming herself with the other. The performance is technically impressive. If I didn't know better, I might almost believe she felt something.
When the crew lead steps toward me, I walk forward.
He holds out a cloth, and on it, the pendant.
Imperial green jadeite. Genuine. The real thing. Still resting against a strip of burial silk, the gold setting tarnished but intact. The color is extraordinary even in the flat morning light — deep and layered, the kind of green that doesn't exist in anything manufactured.
I pick it up.
It is heavier than the fake. I remember this weight now. I remember my mother's hands.
I close my fingers around it and I say nothing. There is nothing to say.
Behind me, I can hear Cali still talking to her phone. Her voice has gone tight and high. 'She took it. She actually took it right out of my mother's coffin. Are you watching this? Are you seeing what she is?'
I turn and walk back toward the gate. My attorney falls into step beside me.
'We have everything documented,' he says quietly. 'Chain of custody, the Sotheby's report, the court order. Everything's clean.'
'Good.'
I don't look back at Cali. I don't need to.
---
By evening, the video is everywhere.
They've done clean work, I'll give them that. The court order is gone. The legal crew is cropped out. What remains is forty seconds of my face — composed, unreadable — as the coffin rises, cut to Cali's hands clutching the headstone, cut to the pendant being placed in my palm. The caption reads: *Billionaire psycho digs up my mother's grave for jewelry.*
Twenty million views by midnight. My name trending on four platforms. A GoFundMe for the Armstrong family's *legal fees* at eighty thousand dollars within six hours.
I sit at the desk in my suite and watch the Armstrongs' livestream. Dereck is in frame beside Cali now, his hand on her shoulder, his eyes red in the way that takes practice. He talks about love. About loss. About a woman who could not let go of her hatred even in the face of death.
The chat scrolls too fast to read.
I watch his face. The careful grief. The practiced breaks in his voice.
I set my phone down and open my laptop.
I hold the pendant up to the desk lamp. The green burns deep and clean and real.
'Okay,' I say quietly, to no one.
To myself.
To my mother.
'My turn.'
