Send the Ugly One, He’ll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!

Chapter Twenty-Two — Notes for Maren

Ines drove her home because Maren could not.

That was the fact of the evening: Maren Ashcroft, twenty-four years old, chair of a hundred-and-forty-year-old financial institution, holder of forty percent of a family fortune, sat in the passenger seat of her own car on Storrow Drive with her hands in her lap and her eyes fixed on the dashboard and could not drive. Ines drove. Ines had come down the stairs behind her with the ninth box under her arm — the box itself, not loosed from it, because Maren had asked her, in a voice with no texture in it at all, to carry the box down — and had put it in the trunk and had driven her back across the river and had said nothing, not one word, for six miles.

Then, at a red light on Massachusetts Avenue, Ines said: “She wrote to you.”

“Yes.”

“Is it bad?”

“No.” Maren watched the light. “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Ines looked at her sideways.

“You don’t look like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you.”

“I look like a woman who has been lied to about the fundamental grammar of her own life since she was nine years old,” Maren said, “and who has just been handed a page in her mother’s handwriting that says I know. So yes, I look bad. I’ll look better in a week. Drive.”

Ines drove.

They went back over the river and up through the dark and into the compound’s gate at nine at night with the headlights sweeping the hedges, and Lucian was in the study with a fire going, and he heard the car and came to the door of the study and stood there with a glass in his hand and watched them come up the hall, and Maren saw his eyes go from her face to the box in Ines’s arms and back to her face.

He said nothing. He waited.

“Ines,” Maren said. “Take the box up to my room. Thank you. Go to bed.”

Ines went.

Maren walked into the study and sat down in the leather chair by the fire — the same chair she had sat in on the first night, in a wet green dress, with her glasses blurry and her hands shaking — and she put her satchel on the floor and her hands on her knees and looked at the fire for a while.

Lucian sat down across from her. He did not ask.

“My mother knew about the brakes,” Maren said.

The fire popped.

“Say that again,” Lucian said.

“There’s a letter. Nine pages, in the ninth box, addressed to me, written when I was nine — she wrote it two weeks before the crash, in the attic, on a Wednesday, because she needed to look at everything at once and the attic was the only room in the house he never went into.” Maren’s voice was steady in a way that cost her. “She knew about the trust. She knew about the codicil, before it was written — she’d worked out that the primary instrument governs and that the class governs and that nothing in the codicil survives if the class holds. She knew he was moving the State Street shares. She knew he took pages off the bottom of every document before it left the house. And she knew — this is the part — she knew that the car had been in for brakes three days before the crash, at a garage in Somerville, and she had seen the invoice, and she had noticed something on it, and she wrote the sentence, Lucian. She wrote: he had taken the brakes to a man who does brakes.” Maren looked up. “That’s what she wrote. That’s the whole sentence. She didn’t have time to write any more of it.”

Lucian Vescari sat very still.

“I want to be very careful here,” he said, “because a sentence in a letter is not a case, and I’ve spent five years learning the difference. What are you actually telling me.”

“I’m telling you that my mother believed my father had the brakes on her car worked on, by a specific man, three days before a crash that killed her, in which I was in the car, facing her, and saw it happen, and afterward nobody in my family ever asked me — not once, in fifteen years — what I saw.” Maren said it flatly. “That’s what I’m telling you. And now I have a second thing, which is a letter in her hand telling me to go and find out for myself, because — and this is the actual sentence, this is what’s inside my coat right now — I have watched you since you were two years old. You have never once, in your entire life, asked anybody else what happened.”

She pulled the folded pages out of her inside pocket and held them, and did not offer them to him.

“She says not to be cruel,” Maren said. “She says the arithmetic works, that cruelty always works, that it’s cheap and that’s why everybody does it, and she asks me to do all the arithmetic and then stop being careful.” She laughed — a small, dry, terrible sound. “She wrote it five years before I met you. She wrote it before the firewall. She wrote it in the attic of a house I have just spent two years learning to take apart, and she knew, Lucian. She sat up there with rain in the eaves and she knew that her nine-year-old daughter was going to grow up into a woman who does arithmetic, and she did not write to tell me to be good, and she did not write to tell me to be kind. She wrote to tell me to stop, when it’s done, and go and be a person.”

The fire crackled.

Lucian said, after a moment: “What do you want me to do.”

“I want you to find out,” Maren said. “Quietly. I want to know whether it’s true. I don’t want to know before I know — I want the truth, not a settlement, not a leverage file, not a thing you can use at a table. I want the invoice. I want the name of the man. I want to know what happened in a garage in Somerville three days before my mother died.” She folded the letter and put it back inside her coat, next to the rib, next to the USB stick. “And then I’m going to sit with it and I’m going to make a decision, and the decision is mine, and you’re not going to have an opinion about it out loud.”

Lucian Vescari looked at her for a long moment.

“That’s an unusual thing to say to me,” he said.

“I know.”

“Nobody in this business says things like that to me.”

“I know,” Maren said. “I’m going to be the whole of your education about the difference between leverage and truth, and it’s going to take years, and you’re going to hate parts of it.” She stood up. “It’s nine at night and I have not eaten since breakfast and I am going to go upstairs and put my mother’s box in my room and sit on the floor with it, alone, and I’d like you to not follow me, and I’d like the fact that I said that to be — I don’t know. A thing you notice.”

Lucian Vescari stood up as well, and he did not follow her, and he said, at the door of the study, when she was already three steps down the hall:

“Maren.”

She stopped.

“Your mother,” Lucian said, “would have made an extremely dangerous woman.”

Maren did not turn around.

“She was,” she said. “That’s why he did it.”