“So you let him empty my business accounts to buy her a house.”
“It is all the same family,” he said. He finally looked up, his eyes watery and tired, before he quickly looked down again. “Gavin said he would restructure the shares. He said you would still be taken care of.”
He turned around and walked back toward room 314, his shoulders hunched as if he were trying to make himself smaller.
I walked down the concrete stairs to the ground floor, my heels clicking sharply against the stone. The heavy glass doors of the lobby opened onto the concrete plaza, and the damp, heavy heat of the East Tennessee afternoon hit me like a physical weight.
The asphalt of the parking lot was soft under the autumn sun. I reached my car, a gray Volvo wagon, and unlocked the door, but a sharp voice stopped me before I could step inside.
“Audrey.”
My mother had taken the visitor elevators down. She was walking quickly across the parking lot, her knit top clinging to her shoulders, her face flushed beneath her pale makeup.
