Cashan opened the black leather folder, and the first photograph destroyed the last excuse I could have made for Adrian.
It showed him entering the Bellmont Hotel with Serena three months earlier.
His hand rested possessively against the small of her back.
She was laughing up at him, wearing the pearl earrings my mother had left me—the same earrings Serena had insisted she had never taken.
The next photograph had been taken six weeks later.
Different hotel.
Same embrace.
Under the photographs were copies of room charges, restaurant receipts, and transfers from a Cross corporate account.
I looked up at Cashan.
“You knew?”
“I knew Adrian was misusing company funds,” he said.
“I ordered an internal investigation.
I did not know the woman accompanying him was your sister until four days ago.”
His voice remained controlled, but his jaw had tightened.
I turned another page.
There, beneath the evidence of Adrian’s affair, was a document carrying the embossed seal of the Cross family trust.
My name appeared in the opening paragraph.
“This is not our engagement agreement,” I said.
“No.” Cashan stood across from me, one hand resting against the table.
“It is an amendment my mother added before Adrian proposed.”
I read slowly.
The arrangement had never been as simple as Adrian had allowed me to believe.
He had told me that marrying me would release a small block of shares his grandmother intended for him.
He had acted as though I were an inconvenient condition attached to property that rightfully belonged to him.
But the shares had never been promised to Adrian.
They belonged to a protective trust created jointly by his grandmother and my mother years earlier, when my mother’s financial advice had helped save a failing division of the Cross company.
If Adrian married me and upheld the terms of the engagement in good faith, he would receive a temporary voting proxy.
If he abandoned, defrauded, publicly humiliated, or proved unfaithful to me, the proxy would pass directly to me for ten years.
My fingers tightened around the page.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“My mother wanted you to accept or reject Adrian without being influenced by the shares,” Cashan replied.
“She believed he would treat you well once he understood your value.”
“And you?”
“I believed Adrian understood only leverage.”
There was no triumph in his answer.
Only regret.
I glanced back at the photographs.
“He was sleeping with Serena while waiting for me to marry him and unlock the proxy.”
“Yes.”
“And Serena thinks he plans to replace me.”
“She knows enough to be dangerous and not enough to realize she is being used.”
I laughed once, but the sound broke in the middle.
For years, Serena had treated every part of my life as something she could seize.
She had taken my mother’s jewelry, my place beside my father at family dinners, and friends who discovered that pleasing her was easier than defending me.
Adrian was simply the largest prize she had tried to claim.
Yet even she had not understood the game.
Adrian did not want Serena instead of me.
He wanted Serena privately and the trust publicly.
Cashan closed the folder halfway.
“What did you intend when you called me?”
The black dress suddenly felt less like armor and more like
