Chapter 3 3. The Reading
Hazel
My father's study smelled exactly the way it always had. Leather and cigar smoke and the cold mineral smell of the fireplace that was never lit in daylight. And walking into it felt like being called to the principal's office of my entire childhood.
Nothing in this room had ever been good news.
Three board members sat down the long side of the mahogany table, the same table my father used to make me stand in front of when my grades slipped.
“Miss Hazel, welcome back.” Jude Hawthorne rose the moment I entered, the only one who did. A big, gentle, gray-templed man who'd been slipping me butterscotch candies since I was six, and the sight of his kind face nearly undid me faster than the casket had.
“Thank you, Jude. I hope the last six years have treated you well.”
Beside him, Alan Maxwell stayed seated, neat and narrow, giving me a smile that never once reached his eyes and a set of mental calculations I could practically hear ticking.
And at the end, Stephen McAllister didn't look up from his phone at all, aloof as a cat, present only because absence would've been noted.
Across from them, two attorneys, gray and grayer, a leather folio open between them like a body on a table.
And against the far bookcase, apart from all of it, standing with his arms crossed, entirely at ease was Caden.
He didn't look at me when I came in. He looked at a spot on the carpet, jaw set, and I told myself I was glad.
"This house has missed your presence for the past six years." Jude came around the table and took both my cold hands in his warm ones. "I am so sorry, sweetheart. About your father— " His voice thickened and he stopped, and just squeezed my hands instead, and that nearly finished me. "Whatever happens in this room, you have one friend in it. Remember that."
"Thank you, Jude," I managed.
Alan Maxwell cleared his throat, gently, a man reminding the room of the clock. "Perhaps we might begin. Out of respect for Miss Ellington's grief, the sooner the better."
Out of respect. Right.
I found the empty chair at the foot of the table, folded my hands the way my mother taught me, and said, "Alright, let’s get on with it."
The elder attorney put on his glasses. And he began.
There was the language you'd expect first — the sound mind, the sole authorship, the date, my father's full name laid out like a headstone: James Whitmore Ellington. I let it wash over me. I almost missed the part that mattered.
"—The whole of my estate," the attorney read, "inclusive of all real property, liquid assets, controlling interests, and the entirety of Ellington Holdings and its subsidiary concerns, I bequeath undivided to my heir. It is my will that this estate pass to the next male biological heir of the Ellington line."
The room went very quiet.
The words arrived one at a time and refused to assemble. Male. Biological. Heir.
"I'm sorry," I said. My voice sounded far away. "Read that again."
He read it again. Same words.
"That's a mistake," I said.
The attorneys exchanged a look I hated. "There's no mistake, Miss Ellington. The document was executed three months ago, witnessed and notarized. Your father was very specific."
Three months ago. My father had been alive and well, and had sat in a room like this one and chosen, deliberately, in his sound mind, to write me out of my own name. Male biological heir.
"Then I hope you brought some kind of miracle child," I said, "because my father didn't have a male biological heir. He had me. A daughter. That's the whole list." I heard my voice climbing and couldn't stop it. "He had one child. If he wanted a son, he had sixty years to produce one and he didn't, so what, precisely, are we all sitting here reading?"
Alan Maxwell steepled his fingers. "That is rather the difficulty. As written, the heir named in this document" — a pause, delicate — "does not appear to exist."
"He doesn't," I said.
"Which means," Maxwell went on, and I watched him arrive somewhere he'd clearly already been, "the estate is, at present, unclaimed. And the will provides that in such a case, the matter falls to this board to resolve. It is left to the three of us" — a small nod down the table — "to determine who shall be recognized as claimant to the succession."
So there it was. My father hadn't named me. He'd handed the question of my own blood to a committee.
"Then let's resolve it," I said. "I'm his daughter. I'm the only Ellington in the building. I don't see the debate."
"Nor do I." Jude didn't hesitate, didn't so much as glance at the others before he said it, his big hands flat on the table. "This is plain and simple, and I'll not pretend otherwise to be diplomatic. Hazel is James's child. His blood. Whatever the letter of that clause was reaching for, its spirit dies the moment we forget there's a living Ellington sitting at this table. My vote is Hazel. It was always going to be Hazel."
Something behind my ribs unclenched, just slightly. One friend in the room. He'd told me, and he'd meant it.
"A lovely sentiment," Alan Maxwell said, in the tone of a man setting a sentiment down gently so as not to break it. "And if this were a matter of affection, I'd cast the same vote. But it isn't. It's a matter of survival." He turned to me, and his smile was almost apologetic, which was worse than if it hadn't been. "Miss Ellington, you are, by all accounts, a bright young woman with a master's degree and no operational experience whatsoever. You have never sat on this board. You have never closed a deal, managed a holding, or so much as attended a meeting of the concerns your father ran. And those concerns are not a chain of boutiques. They are — complicated. Dangerous, in places you have been deliberately kept from."
"And your alternative," I said, though I already knew, and I felt the floor tilt toward it.
"Mr. Durham." Maxwell gestured across the room without quite looking at Caden, the way you gesture at a solution rather than a person. "He was raised in this house by James's own hand. And for the last six years, running the Durham holdings in England — which he inherited at eighteen and has, by every report, roughly tripled. He is the male heir this clause reaches for in all but blood, and he is the only claimant in this room who has actually done the job. Sentiment says Hazel. But sense says Caden." He spread his hands. "I am paid for sense."
I didn't look at Caden. I wouldn't give either of them the satisfaction. But I felt the whole room lean toward him, that ripple of grass in wind.
"One apiece, then," the elder attorney observed quietly. "Mr. McAllister. Yours breaks the tie."
For the first time, Stephen McAllister set down his phone. He looked at me. He looked at Caden. He looked, for a long moment, at the ceiling, as though the answer were written in the plaster and faintly boring.
"No," he said.
"No?" Maxwell's calm cracked, just at the edge.
"I decline to vote." McAllister leaned back. "You want me to hand an empire to a grieving girl or a runaway godson on a Tuesday, over the body of the man who actually knew which of them deserved it. I won't. Frankly, gentlemen, I don't think it's ours to decide at all." He tipped his head toward the far bookcase, toward me, a lazy line drawn between us. "It's theirs. Let the two of them sort out whose name goes on the door. That's my vote."
And he picked his phone back up.
The silence that followed had teeth.
"Then the board is deadlocked," the attorney said. "Which the document, once again, anticipated. There is a further clause."
He turned a page. My heart was somewhere up near my throat.
"Should the board fail to resolve the succession — should the claim remain contested or deadlocked — I direct that the question pass to the claimants themselves. My daughter, Hazel Rose Ellington. My ward, Caden Alexander Durham.” The attorney's dry voice didn't change, but something in the room did. "The two shall have one hundred days from the reading of this will to determine the succession between them. It is my hope that they arrive at it together.”
Together. In one hundred days.
I stole a glance at Caden. His face didn’t show any concern, or shock for that matter. It was as if he knew that this was coming. And that made my blood boil.
"And if we don't?" I said. "If your two claimants can't play nicely inside a hundred days?"
For the first time, the old attorney's face did something almost like pity. "Then the final clause takes effect. In the absence of any resolution, Ellington Holdings — all of it, whole — is to be liquidated. Sold at open auction to the highest bidder, the proceeds distributed per the schedule attached." He folded his hands. "Everything your father built. Sold to whoever can pay."
The room absorbed it. Jude Hawthorne shut his eyes. Alan Maxwell did not look remotely surprised, and something behind his calm did the arithmetic of what a fire sale might be worth to a patient man. McAllister didn't look up at all.
"It is the firm's counsel," the attorney said, "and it was your father's expressed wish, that the two of you settle this amicably. A public war over the estate, or a sale, would be catastrophic — not only in value, but in blood. Your father did not want that. He wanted the two of you to reach an understanding."
An understanding. With Caden. Who'd known. Who was standing against my father's bookcase with his arms crossed and his face shut like a bank vault while three men debated whether he was more of an Ellington than the only Ellington left.
I stood up. The chair scraped back too loud.
"My father isn't in the ground yet," I said, and I was proud of how level it came out. "His body is one room away. And you've got lawyers reading me out of my own family before he's cold." I picked up my bag. "So here's my understanding. Tomorrow, I bury my father. And then I'll fight for what's mine. Clause by clause, day by day, all one hundred of them if I have to."
"Hazel." Jude was on his feet again, his kind face creased with worry. Not for the estate, I understood, but for me. "Please. Whatever you decide, don't do it alone. This world your father kept you out of. It is not gentle with people who walk into it alone."
I let out a small smile.
"I've been alone six years, Jude," I said. "I've had practice."
And I walked out. I did not look at Caden on my way past. But I felt him watching me go.
— End of Chapter Three: To Be Continued. —
