Aria’s POV
Barnes t in the corridor before I reached the door. "Before you go in," he said.
I stopped.
He kept his voice low and even. "The phone records from one of Charles’s contacts ca back an hour ago, we now have the full picture now."
"Tell ."
"Charles has been hemorrhaging money for months. Gambling private tables. He owes dangerous people a whole lot of money." Barnes paused. "When you took the Monroe company, you cut off his last legitimate inco stream; now he has nothing left except."
"Access to Noah," I said.
"Yes. He made contact with an overseas trafficking network we’ve been tracking for years, the man at Noah’s school wasn’t just a scout. He was the handoff." Barnes held my gaze. "There was a buyer already confird. The paynt had been agreed. Fifty thousand, enough to clear the most dangerous of his debts and buy himself ti."
The corridor was very quiet.
"Fifty thousand," I said.
"Yes."
"How close?" I said.
"The handoff was ant to happen within forty eight hours of the school attempt. Ms. Pearce stopped it with eleven minutes between Noah’s reading session ending and outdoor break beginning."
I pressed my hand flat against the wall beside and breathed once, slowly.
"Does Damien know?"
"I told him a few minutes ago."
I nodded. Straightened. Picked up my bag from where it had slipped on my shoulder. "Alright," I said.
Barnes stepped aside as I walked to the door, put my hand on the handle, and went in.
*********
The interview room Barnes arranged was not a cell — a small concession to Eleanor’s cooperation, I supposed — but it was not far from one. Pale walls, a table, two chairs.
Eleanor Monroe sat very straight in her chair the way she always had, spine correct, hands folded on the table, the lifelong habit of a woman who believed posture was character. But the composure that had always felt impenetrable was gone. She looked older than the last ti I’d seen her — smaller, sohow, and when she looked up as I walked in, sothing moved across her face that I had almost never seen there. Sha.
I sat across from her and didn’t speak first. I’d learned, in boardrooms and in harder places, that silence was its own form of pressure.
Eleanor lasted approximately a few seconds. "Thank you for coming," she said.
"I’m not here for you," I told her. "I’m here because Barnes thinks you have sothing relevant to say, and I want to hear it before anyone else tells their version."
She absorbed this with a small nod, accepting it. "I gave Charles information. I want you to know that I didn’t understand what he was planning to do with it."
"But you knew he was planning sothing."
A pause. "Yes."
"And you chose to help him anyway."
Her jaw tightened slightly, then released. "I told myself it was just information. Nothing that could hurt you directly. I thought he wanted leverage. A negotiation. Not—" She stopped. "When Barnes told what he did at Noah school, I was"
"I don’t need your reaction to finding out," I said. "Tell what you ca to tell ."
Eleanor looked at her hands on the table. The perfectly maintained nails, the rings she still wore out of habit rather than sentint. Then she looked up.
"There is sothing I should have told you years ago," she said. "Sothing I’ve carried every day since and told myself you were better off not knowing, which was a lie I told for my own sake, not yours."
The room was very quiet. "You were not born to ," Eleanor said.
I held very still.
"I had a younger sister," she continued, her voice careful and asured in a way of soone who has rehearsed this for a very long ti and is finally saying it. "Catherine, four years younger than — gentle, softer than I ever was, the sort of person who trusted people she shouldn’t have." A pause. "When she was twenty, she was raped. By a man she knew, soone in our social circle, soone who faced no consequences because our father decided that involving the authorities would embarrass the family." Her voice didn’t waver on it, but her hands tightened on the table. "Catherine carried the pregnancy because she wanted to. She said she was not going to let what had been done to her determine whether the child deserved to live."
My throat was very tight as I didn’t move.
"She died giving birth to you," Eleanor said. "Hemorrhage. She was twenty-one years old and she held you once before she lost consciousness and she never regained it." She exhaled, slow and unsteady. "We brought you ho. Charles and I had been married for five years and had only Vivan so we registered you as ours — it was straightforward enough, in those days, with the right people paid. And we told ourselves it was better this way. That you would have a stable family. That you would never need to know."
The fluorescent light humd quietly above us.
"What was her full na again?" I said, trying to hold down my tears.
"Catherine." Eleanor’s eyes were wet, but she wasn’t performing it; this was sothing she’d been holding for decades and the weight of it was finally showing. "Catherine Louise Whitmore. She was funny, and stubborn, and she sang constantly, off-key, and she was the best person I have ever known." A pause. "You have her eyes. I have thought about it every single day of your life."
The strange thing was that it didn’t feel like a revelation so much as a confirmation of sothing I’d never had words for — the way I’d always sat slightly outside the Monroe family, the way Charles had hated at throughout my childhood, the way Eleanor had loved in the distant, managerial way of soone who hadn’t allowed herself to love completely, the way Vivan has always seen as a competitor not her sister.
"He was going to sell my son," I said finally.
Eleanor flinched.
"Charles. The man you’ve been helping, he had hired a man a few tres from Noah’s classroom." I kept my voice even. "He was going to sell a four-year-old child to a trafficking network for money to cover gambling debts."
"I didn’t know"
"I know you didn’t know." I looked at her directly. "But you knew enough to ask. And you chose not to." I paused. "Why?"
She was quiet for a long mont. Then, very quietly: "Because I am very good at choosing not to know things that make my life inconvenient. I have been doing it for years. I did it with Catherine. I did it with you and Vivian. I did it with Charles." She t my eyes, and what I found there was not the calculation I’d braced for but sothing exhausted and true. "I have failed every person who needed to be brave, Aria. Every single one. I am not asking you to forgive that. I am asking you to believe that I know it."
I thought about Catherine Whitmore, twenty-one years old, holding a baby once and then letting go. I thought about what it ant to choose life for soone else when your own had been taken from you in the worst way imaginable. I thought about the fact that sowhere in was the stubbornness and the defiance and the refusal to be small that I’d always attributed to survival, and maybe so of it — maybe a thread of it — ca from a woman I’d never known, who had decided, in the worst circumstances, that I was worth sothing.
I stood up.
"Tell Barnes everything," I said. "Every piece of information you gave Charles, every contact, every communication. Everything."
Eleanor nodded. "Yes."
"And then" I stopped. Looked at her one more ti. "I’m filing a restraining order. You will not contact , you will not contact Damien, you will not approach Noah. That holds regardless of what cos next."
"I understand."
"I’m not pressing charges against you." I said it before I’d entirely decided it, and then I knew it was right. "Not because you deserve rcy. Because Catherine deserved a daughter who didn’t spend her life in courtrooms, and because I am choosing not to let Charles turn into soone who does." I held her gaze. "But make no mistake — if you contact my family again, I will change my mind."
I picked up my bag and walked to the door.
"Aria." Eleanor’s voice was small and real. "I’m sorry. For all of it. For every ti I should have chosen you and didn’t."
I stood at the door with my hand on the fra.
"I know," I said "I believe you."
I walked out into the corridor and kept walking until I found a bench near the building’s exit, and I sat on it, and I pressed both hands over my face, and I let myself feel grief of learning who you actually ca from — the grief of a woman you never t and never got to love, who loved you anyway.
Catherine.
I said her na quietly in the empty corridor. Hello. I didn’t know about you. I wish I had.
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