“No,” I said. “You made inappropriate. I’m just supplying context.”
I heard Mr. Blackwood clear his throat behind me, but I wasn’t finished yet.
“There’s more,” I said.
That was when Becca stood up too, crystals flashing like a disco ball in church light. Her face had gone tight and shiny.
“What estate?” she asked, looking at Grant now instead of me. “What is she talking about? You said—”
“Sit down,” Grant snapped.
The whole cathedral went still on that one.
Becca blinked like she’d been slapped.
I had hated her for the last thirty minutes with a purity that almost felt medicinal. But that look on her face—shock curdling into humiliation—gave me my first hint that she had not, in fact, come there fully briefed. She had come to make an entrance. He had let her believe she’d be admired.
My father would have adored the cruelty of that trap, if only because he hadn’t set it for her. He’d set it for Grant, and she’d simply walked in holding his hand.
I glanced at Blackwood. He gave the slightest nod.
“Furthermore,” I said, reading again, “to Rebecca Thornton, who according to the investigator’s report appears to be under the impression she is entering a life of considerable financial comfort, I leave this clarification: the house, the cars, the investment accounts, the club membership, and nearly every visible luxury attached to my son-in-law have been subsidized by Crawford family assets, not by his independent success.”
Becca turned fully toward Grant then. “What?”
The word cracked.
Grant looked murderous now. At me, at Blackwood, maybe at the entire concept of public consequence.
“Rebecca,” he said through clenched teeth, “this isn’t the time.”
She laughed once, sharp and disbelieving. “Apparently it is.”
A few rows back, someone coughed into what sounded suspiciously like a laugh. Aunt Helen didn’t bother pretending. Her laugh came out full-bodied and rich, the way it did when she watched bad people discover arithmetic.
Mr. Blackwood stepped into the aisle and said in his smooth courtroom voice, “Since the matter has been raised publicly, let me add for the sake of accuracy that California community property does not extend to inherited assets protected by trust and affirmed by prenuptial agreement.”
Becca stared at Grant. “Prenup?”
Oh, she truly hadn’t known. That was almost beautiful.
Grant swung toward Blackwood. “You can’t do this in a church.”