Chapter 2 - The Lockout
Chloe practically leaped out of the pew. The stolen emerald silk flared around her knees, a mockery of the elegance it was meant to convey.
"Marcus!" she hissed, her voice panicked, echoing horribly in the sacred space. "Do something!"
Marcus sat frozen, his face the color of wet ash. He looked at me, his eyes wide and pleading, entirely abandoning his mistress to save his own skin. "Eleanor... Ellie, please. This is a misunderstanding. She's crazy—"
"Get out," I whispered. My voice wasn't loud, but in that silent church, it carried like a gunshot.
The security guards reached the front row. One of them, a man named Russo who had worked for my mother for a decade, gestured toward the side exit. "Miss. Sir. Let's go."
Marcus scrambled to his feet, trying to reach across the aisle toward me. "Eleanor, we need to talk! Your mother was heavily medicated, she didn't know what she was writing—"
Aunt Margaret stood up. She didn't say a word. She simply raised her black leather handbag and slammed it directly into Marcus’s chest, forcing him back a step. "You heard the widow," Margaret said icily. "Walk. Or Russo will carry you out by your teeth."
They were escorted out through the side nave. Chloe was crying real tears now, her high heels stumbling over the ancient stone, the stolen McQueen dress dragging against the wooden pews.
The rest of the funeral passed in a blur of surreal vindication. When I finally returned to the sprawling suburban colonial house Marcus and I had shared for a decade, I didn't go inside to weep. I went inside and called a locksmith.
By 4:00 PM, every lock on the doors was changed. The security codes were wiped. I dragged Marcus’s designer suits, his golf clubs, and his expensive Italian shoes out onto the front driveway. It was unseasonably cold, the sky heavy with the threat of rain, but I felt nothing but a burning, electric clarity.
My phone had been buzzing nonstop. Marcus. 47 missed calls.
I sat on the front porch steps, wearing my black funeral dress, and finally answered.
"Eleanor! Thank God!" Marcus breathed heavily into the receiver. "Look, I am at a hotel. I'm so sorry. I can explain everything. Chloe means nothing. It was a stupid, meaningless mistake. But we have bigger problems. The bank just froze my corporate accounts. Sterling put a lien on my agency. You have to call him off, Ellie. If the firm goes under, we both lose everything!"
"Correction," I said, my voice smooth and utterly devoid of warmth. "If the firm goes under, you lose everything. I just inherited a real estate empire."
"Ellie, be reasonable! You're grieving! Don't throw away twelve years of marriage over one mistake!"
"She was wearing my mother's birthday present, Marcus. You took it from my closet, handed it to your whore, and paraded her in front of my mother's casket."
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"I didn't give it to her!" he panicked. "She found it in my car! I was bringing it to the dry cleaners for you, I swear, and she just took it! She's obsessed with you, Eleanor! She's crazy!"
I hung up, blocked his number, and watched as the sky finally broke, pouring freezing rain all over his custom Brioni suits in the driveway. Grace is a weapon, my mother had said. But sometimes, so is a thunderstorm.
