The last time I saw her, she sat outside a courtroom holding a paper cup of coffee.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I believed her apology.
I didn’t absolve her.
But I believed it.
“I should have checked,” she added.
“Yes.”
She nodded.
Then she whispered, “He told me you didn’t love him anymore.”
I almost smiled.
“Men like Lucas always need the woman they’re betraying to become the villain. Otherwise they’d have to look at themselves.”
She cried.
I didn’t.
Not then.
The divorce became final eleven months after the lunch.
I kept Lumina.
Lucas kept his debts.
Beatrice went to trial.
Thirty-three investors testified.
One had died before proceedings began.
Evelyn spoke for nearly four hours.
When asked why she had trusted Beatrice, she said something that silenced the courtroom.
“Because fraud rarely walks through your door looking like a thief. Sometimes it arrives carrying champagne and calling you darling.”
Beatrice was convicted.
I thought that would be the last surprise she ever gave me.
It wasn’t.
Three weeks after sentencing, Mina called.
“You need to come to my office.”
I groaned.
“If this is another shell company, burn it.”
“Camilla.”
Something in her voice stopped me.
“What happened?”
“We found the missing money.”
I sat upright.
“How much?”
“Not all of it.”
“How much?”
“Almost two million.”
I closed my eyes.
“Where?”
There was a pause.
“That’s complicated.”
Two hours later, I sat across from Mina and Elena.
Between them was a bank file bearing a name I hadn’t heard in four years.
Arthur Mercer.
Lucas’s father.
Beatrice’s late husband.
Arthur had been quiet.
Gentle.
Almost invisible beside Beatrice.
He had been the only Mercer who never referred to Lumina as Lucas’s restaurant.
The night before we opened, Arthur had come alone.
He sat at table seventeen while I tested dishes on the staff.
When everyone left, he found me scrubbing a counter.
“Camilla.”
I looked up.
He placed a small brass object beside me.
An old restaurant key.
“From my father’s diner,” he said.
I smiled.
“I didn’t know your father owned a restaurant.”
“Forty-two seats. Terrible coffee. Best pancakes in Ohio.”
He pushed the key toward me.
“For luck.”
I still carried that key in my office desk.
Arthur died eighteen months later.
Beatrice told us his estate was simple.
House.
Retirement.
Insurance.
Everything passed to her.
That wasn’t completely true.
Mina slid a trust document toward me.
Arthur had discovered something before his death.
Beatrice had been taking money from him.
Small amounts for years.
Investments he never approved.
Loans he never authorized.
He never confronted her publicly.
Instead, he created a private trust.
“He moved nearly two million dollars into it,” Mina said.
I stared at her.
