You took four grandchildren — your own blood — and you let them grow up in shelters.
You let them sleep in storage rooms and wear other children’s clothes while you sat me down and planned a society wedding for me.
Four little boys with your own family’s face, and you left them out in the cold so the stock wouldn’t dip.”
Chapter 19 — I Did It for the Family
“They are not Ravensworths,” Viveca whispered, and the perfect voice had finally cracked all the way through, and what came out from under it was ugly and frightened and true.
“She is a nobody, Auden.
A waitress from Queens with no name and no people.
If the board had learned you’d fathered four illegitimate children with a — a server — right before the Wexley merger, the stock would have collapsed.
The whole European position, gone.
Everything your grandfather built.
I did it for the family.
I did it for you.”
“You didn’t do it for me,” I said, and I felt the last thread of a lifetime of loyalty to my mother snap somewhere in my chest, cleanly, without pain, the way a rope parts once it’s finally cut through.
“Don’t you dare.