CHAPTER 8: Virginia Prescott Does Not Apologize

Virginia stared at the phone as though betrayal were a device small enough to fit in Sarah's hand.
For a moment, the terrace held only rain, string music leaking through glass, and the distant noise of reporters at the gate. Then Virginia recovered the way rich women learned to recover: by turning guilt into an insult.
"You have no idea what that night looked like," she said.
Sarah's fingers tightened around the phone. "It looked like me on the ground."
"It looked like my son about to throw his life away for a woman who wanted access to him more than she wanted a future."
Lucas stepped forward. "Stop."
Virginia ignored him. "Your father had already warned us."
Sarah froze. "My father is dead."
"Not that father."
The words arrived gently, almost lazily, and landed like a knife placed rather than thrown.
Charles Prescott closed his eyes.
Lucas looked from his mother to Sarah. "What are you talking about?"
Virginia seemed to realize she had revealed more than she intended, but pride would not let her retreat. "Ask Charles why your grandfather really put the conduct clause in the trust. Ask why the Bennett girl mattered before you ever met her."
Sarah felt the terrace tilt.
Her mother had worked as a housekeeper at Prescott House twenty-seven years earlier. She left Newport pregnant and poor, married a mechanic named Daniel Bennett, and never spoke of the Prescott family except to say old houses kept old sins.
Charles sat heavily in a wicker chair.
"No," Sarah said. "Do not make this uglier just to save yourself."
Charles looked at her with tears in his eyes, and she knew before he spoke.
"Your mother came to me before she left," he said. "I was young. Cowardly. My father paid her to disappear. Daniel Bennett raised you because he was better than all of us."
Lucas took one step back.
Not disgust. Not rejection.
Shock.
Virginia folded her arms. "Now you understand. A marriage between Lucas and Sarah would make the trust vulnerable. She is not only unsuitable. She is a Prescott by blood through Charles's affair. The board could challenge everything."
Sarah could barely breathe.
She was not related to Lucas by blood; Charles was Lucas's uncle, not his father. But the family scandal would explode anyway. Virginia had not hated her because of the chair alone. The chair had simply made Sarah easier to dispose of.
Simone moved closer, one hand on Sarah's shoulder.
Sarah looked at Lucas.
"Did you know?"
His answer came broken and immediate. "No."
Inside the ballroom, someone screamed.
Howard Voss had been found unconscious in the side office.
The confession he had given was gone.