Chapter 300: Chapter 302: She Wants To Speak With Aria
She opened her email.
She had forty six unread messages. Responses to the second file, media pickup, two journalists she’d been cultivating who had questions. The ordinary machinery of what she’d been building, still running, still generating noise even now.
She closed the email.
She looked at the window.
Chelsea at eight AM. The street below coming to life...a woman with a coffee, two men in suits, a delivery truck pulling up outside the building across the street. The ordinary machinery of a city that didn’t know or care what was happening in a room on the third floor of a business hotel.
She thought about her mother.
Patricia Ashford was in Sydney still. They’d spoken three days ago....a careful conversation, the kind they’d been having for months, both of them saying the true things in between the words rather than in them. Her mother had asked how she was. She’d said fine. Her mother had said Victoria and she’d said I know, Mum and her mother had been quiet for a moment and then said come home soon and she’d said I will.
She hadn’t meant it when she’d said it.
She thought about meaning it now.
She picked up her phone.
She looked at the time.
One hour and forty minutes left.
She put the phone down.
She thought about the forty seven pages. The chain Marcus had built from one end to the other....every link, every piece, the book she’d sent because she’d needed to feel real. That one. That specific one.
She’d known when she sent it that it was a risk.
She’d sent it anyway because strategy had stopped being the only thing operating in her by that point. Something else had gotten in.....something that wasn’t cold or calculated, something that had been building for eight months of sitting in an apartment doing exercises and watching someone else’s life happen and feeling, underneath all the careful planning, the specific ache of a woman who had lost everything and couldn’t find a way to grieve it that didn’t involve burning something down.
She’d burned things down.
And now she was sitting in a hotel room with forty seven pages of evidence against her and one hour and thirty eight minutes to decide what happened next.
She stood up.
She went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror.
She looked tired. She hadn’t noticed that before....the specific accumulated tiredness of months of being careful, of watching every move, of maintaining the composure and the patience and the architecture of something she’d told herself was justice for eight months.
She looked at her hands.
The scars. The white lines across her palm and fingers that caught the bathroom light the same way they caught every light, visible in a way they hadn’t been before, the kind of mark that didn’t go away.
She flexed her left hand slowly.
Open. Close.
Better than last week.
Always better than last week.
She put her hands down.
She went back to the desk and sat down and picked up her phone and called Catherine Walsh.
Walsh picked up on the second ring.
"I’ll meet with you," Victoria said. "Today. But not at a lawyer’s office."
A pause. "Where."
"Somewhere neutral," Victoria said. "I’ll text you the address."
Another pause. "Alright."
"And Walsh."
"Yes."
"I want to speak with Aria Chen," Victoria said. "Before anything is filed. Before any of it becomes official." She paused. "Not to negotiate. Not to ask for anything. I just...." She stopped. "I want to speak with her."
The line was quiet for a moment.
"I’ll ask," Catherine said.
"That’s all I’m asking."
She hung up.
She sat there for a moment.
Then she started packing her bag. Not frantically, not the urgent packing of someone running. Slowly and methodically, the way she’d packed for Sydney eight months ago when Harold’s lawyer had sat in a clinic chair and told her the terms and she’d understood that her life had become something she didn’t recognise.
One bag.
Everything that mattered.
She’d been travelling light for eight months.
She was good at it by now.
***
CATHERINE WALSH’S POV
She called Damien first.
"She’ll meet," she said. "Today. Neutral location." A pause. "She asked for Aria."
Damien was quiet for a second.
"Aria already asked for the same thing," he said.
Catherine absorbed that.
"Before filing," Damien said. "Give them the conversation first. Then we file."
"That’s not standard procedure."
"No," he agreed. "It isn’t."
She looked at the forty seven page file on her desk.
"Damien," she said. "The evidence is complete. We don’t need her cooperation to file. We don’t need anything from her at this point." She paused. "The conversation has no legal value."
"I know," he said.
"Then why."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Because Aria asked," he said simply.
Catherine looked at the file.
She’d been doing this for twenty years. She’d sat across from some version of this situation more times than she could count....the evidence, the filing, the clean procedural end of something that had been anything but clean in its unfolding.
She didn’t usually feel anything about it.
She felt something about this one.
"I’ll arrange it," she said.
She hung up and looked at the file for one more moment.
Then she started making calls.
****
ARIA’S POV
She was with her mother when Catherine called.
Mei was at the kitchen table with Mrs Abel’s tea and the particular composure of a woman who had said everything she needed to say and was now simply present....not shaken, not performing steadiness, just there. That was her mother. That had always been her mother.
Aria had sat across from her and held her hands and they’d talked for an hour about nothing that was directly about any of this. About the restaurant. About Alexander calling that morning from Singapore. About a film Mei had watched twice this week because she liked it and that was enough reason.
The call came at nine forty.
She stepped into the corridor.
Catherine told her.
Victoria had agreed to meet. Had asked for Aria first.
"When," Aria said.
"This afternoon. Two PM." A pause. "Damien approved it. The filing happens after."
Aria looked at the kitchen door. Through the small window in it she could see her mother saying something to Mrs Abel that made Mrs Abel laugh, the two of them at the table with their tea, the ordinary comfortable warmth of it.
"I’ll be there," she said.
She hung up.
