Chapter 7 - The Daughter's Sunflower
The clock on the diner wall ticked past eleven in the morning as Mason Caldwell finished reading my notes.
"You need to go home, Harper," Mason said, closing the notebook and handing it back to me.
"Pack your personal laptop, make sure your backups are secure, and spend some time with your little girl."
"Mason, if Alden realizes what I took from the copy room, he will have his corporate attorneys file an injunction against me by sunset," I said.
"Let him file whatever he wants," Mason replied, a predatory smile touching his silver mustache.
"My legal team consists of twelve former federal prosecutors who eat young trust-fund bullies for breakfast."
He called his driver, instructing him to take me directly to my apartment in Queens and wait outside the building.
Forty minutes later, the black luxury sedan pulled up to the curb of my modest red-brick apartment complex.
The contrast between the polished German vehicle and the weathered fire escapes felt surreal.
I carried my cardboard box up the three flights of stairs, my key turning softly in the brass lock.
Inside, the apartment was warm and smelled of lavender floor polish and toasted cinnamon bread.
My mother, Eleanor, was sitting at the kitchen table, methodically working on a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle of a seaside village.
"Harper?" she asked, looking up with cloudy eyes that struggled to place the time of day.
"Why are you home so early, sweetheart?"
"Is it already time for Lily's play?"
My heart fractured into a dozen sharp pieces at her words.
Lily’s play had happened four years ago, on a Tuesday when Arthur Remington kept me locked in a room negotiating a debt refinance.
I had promised my seven-year-old daughter that I would sit in the front row with a camera.
Instead, she had performed her dance in a bright yellow sunflower costume while looking at an empty seat next to her grandmother.
By the time I had rushed through the front door that night, the costume was folded neatly on her bed, and she was already asleep with tear tracks on her cheeks.
I had traded my child’s sacred milestones for a company that threw me into the street because of a thirty-cent stain on an arrogant boy's collar.
"No, Mom," I said gently, kissing her paper-thin cheek as I set the cardboard box on the linoleum counter.
"Lily's play was a long time ago."
"Did you do well today, Harper?" she murmured, patting my hand with fragile fingers.
"Did you make the Remington family proud?"
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"I'm done making them proud, Mom," I whispered, tears finally spilling over my lashes.
"From now on, I'm taking care of us."
