Chapter 8
The knock on Clara’s hotel door late that evening was not polite. It was heavy, erratic, and persistent.
Clara paused her television, setting her remote on the nightstand. She walked to the door and peered through the peephole. Julian stood in the dim hallway, his hair disheveled, his grey collared shirt wrinkled at the cuffs, and his tie missing entirely. He looked five years older than he had on Monday night in that dining room.
She unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open just wide enough to block his entrance with her shoulder.
Julian stared at her, his chest heaving. "Clara. Open the door. We need to talk."
"There’s nothing to talk about, Julian," she said, her voice completely devoid of inflection. "If you need to discuss legal matters, my attorney’s office is open during standard business hours."
"Are you insane?" Julian hissed, gripping the edge of the door frame with white knuckles. "Do you have any idea what you’ve done? The bank called me an hour ago. The corporate accounts are frozen, the tax office is auditing the shell company, and Mother is having a panic attack at home because she can't access her liquidity!"
"Then perhaps she should have thought about liquidity before demanding my seat at her table," Clara replied, her tone razor-sharp.
Julian flinched, the memory of that disastrous dinner flashing across his face. "Clara, please. That was... Mother was being difficult, you know how she is. It didn't mean anything. We can fix this. You come home, we drop the injunctions, and we sort the finances out together like a family."
"We were never a family, Julian," Clara said softly, looking him directly in the eye. "We were an insurance policy for your mother’s lifestyle, funded by my salary and maintained by your cowardice. I spent five years trying to be a good wife to a man who couldn't even defend me from a misplaced chair. That’s over."
"You’re going to ruin us," Julian whispered, the anger draining out of him, replaced by a pathetic, hollow desperation. "The firm will go under. We’ll lose the house."
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"Then I suggest you ask your mother to pay the debts," Clara said, echoing his own family’s callous logic back to him. "After all, a mother always comes first, right?"
Without waiting for his response, Clara closed the door firmly in his face, turning the deadbolt with a sharp, definitive click.
