Chapter 8 - THE WOMAN ON THE VIDEO CALL
Marissa Cole had once been the operations manager of Velvet Horizon, and I remembered meeting her at Chloe's birthday party two summers earlier when she had spent the night checking vendor invoices.
Her expression in photographs was tired rather than glamorous, and I wondered whether she had been one of the many employees expected to absorb the mess behind my sister's polished brand.
Leah contacted her through an attorney, who said Marissa would speak voluntarily if her own counsel attended because she was concerned about being implicated in the disputed authorization.
The meeting took place in a conference room with plain gray walls, where the absence of chandeliers and staged music made every hesitant word feel more important.
Marissa admitted she had joined a video call in June under my name, but said Chloe presented it as a harmless rehearsal to test whether Halden's connection and presentation software worked.
She wore glasses because Chloe had handed them to her, and the camera remained partly obscured because Sloane claimed a poor signal might interrupt the meeting.
When Marissa realized the call was being recorded as a real property-approval session, she asked to leave, but Chloe told her the documents were already authorized and she was only confirming logistics.
Marissa said she spoke three short sentences and later received a bonus disguised as event-planning overtime, an arrangement she had questioned before resigning from Velvet Horizon in July.
I listened without interrupting, trying to separate her fear from mine and resist the temptation to treat every person who had complied under pressure as equally responsible.
Her attorney provided messages showing Chloe directing Marissa to say she was “Olivia from design” and reassuring her that the family had approved the transaction.
The wording was careful enough to be deniable in isolation, but placed beside Tessa's objections and the false signature, it formed a disturbing sequence.
Marissa described a cabinet at Velvet Horizon where Sloane stored scanned identification documents and draft contracts; she said she had seen my passport copy among them in June.
She also recalled Mom arriving furious after I told her I would not attend a family dinner to discuss “future plans” because I was preparing for the Seattle conference.
I remembered the dinner invitation, a seemingly minor incident that had ended with Chloe accusing me of treating our parents as less important than strangers.
That accusation had kept me awake at the time, but now I wondered whether the dinner had been intended to obtain my real signature before resorting to another plan.
Leah asked Marissa to provide her original phone messages and emails through counsel, warning that the records needed to be preserved with dates and metadata intact.
When the meeting ended, Marissa looked at me and said she was sorry for using my name, adding that she'd thought a wealthy family disagreement couldn't seriously hurt anyone.
“It hurt a lot of people,” I answered, “and we're still finding out how many.” She nodded without asking me to make her feel better.
Outside the office, I called Beatrice to ask how the mill inventory was progressing, and she told me volunteers had identified machines missing from the old storage room.
Some were decades old, others valuable enough to resell, and Samuel's auditor had discovered mismatched numbers in the asset register that required a careful review.
I asked whether Beatrice could list the apprentices who had been promised training positions before the program was suspended, and she said she already kept their names in a notebook.
One was a twenty-year-old single mother named Jasmine who had saved for child care while waiting for the next sewing class, only to be told the program had no funds.
Another was a veteran retraining after an injury, who had accepted a job far from home when the advertised industrial-machine course was cancelled without explanation.
The stories made the missing rent tangible: each diverted deposit represented not just figures in an account but hours, materials, and chances that could not easily be returned.
That night my father arrived at our apartment without warning, carrying a bank statement and asking whether Ethan and I would listen before deciding what he deserved.
He said he had taken out a private loan against an investment property the previous year after Mom told him Chloe's company was struggling and might collapse publicly.
He had believed the loan would protect our family's reputation while she rebuilt, but the payments to Velvet Horizon had continued long after he was assured it was solvent.
Dad had finally confronted Mom, and she told him the Riverbend sale would repay everyone, that I would understand once the family finances were secure, and that resistance came from my jealousy of Chloe.
He said those last words in a hollow voice, ashamed not merely of hearing them but of how easily he had accepted them before the wedding.
I asked whether he had helped conceal the trust notices addressed to me, and he admitted he sometimes collected certified letters at the house because Mom said she'd handle them.
He never checked whether I received copies, and for the first time he described that omission as his own decision rather than another act he had outsourced to his wife.
I didn't know whether forgiveness would ever come, but I asked him to give Leah the loan statements and write down exactly what Mom had said about the sale.
He agreed, then watched me place the papers in a labeled envelope instead of hugging him, and accepted that we were no longer in a relationship where affection could erase evidence.
After he left, Ethan warmed soup that neither of us particularly wanted, and we ate by the kitchen window while rain worked down the glass in thin uneven lines.
He asked whether I regretted displaying the dress emails to our wedding guests, and I said I regretted the pain but not the decision to tell the truth.
I had spent so long mistaking silence for peace that even a quiet apartment could feel threatening once I stopped apologizing to the people who broke it.
May you like
Before bed, Leah sent a short message confirming that the buyer had extended the closing hold and that the first formal accounting demand had been delivered to Mom and Hawthorne.
Underneath it was a photograph of a newly found invoice for a “bridal contingency garment,” paid from a Riverbend maintenance account, making my wedding costume an expense charged to my grandmother's trust.
