Chapter 15 - New Year’s Day Without the Marble Floor
One year after I found Gianna kneeling beside that mop bucket, we spent New Year’s Eve in a rented cabin outside Hocking Hills.
No marble foyer.
No champagne tower.
No attorney on speakerphone.
Gianna wore wool socks and beat me at cards three games in a row.
Her hands still showed faint scars along two knuckles.
She no longer hid them.
Bailey Architectural Millwork was smaller but profitable.
Austin had completed financial-management counseling required under the restructuring agreement and was repaying certain business obligations over time.
The lender settled its claims involving the incomplete deed without pursuing criminal referral after considering the full civil resolution and Austin’s cooperation, though the false representations remained part of his permanent financial history.
Peyton’s divorce from Austin was still pending.
They had become surprisingly functional co-parents once money stopped passing invisibly between them.
Some relationships improve only after nobody is allowed to pretend anymore.
Austin and I barely spoke.
He called Gianna every Sunday.
At first, she answered only when she felt like it.
Then most weeks.
They did not discuss the house.
They discussed the boys, her garden, his work, and once, for twenty uncomfortable minutes, the fact that he had been afraid of disappointing me since he was nineteen.
Gianna told him fear was not an excuse.
He said, “I know.”
This time she believed he was beginning to.
The house sold to a cardiologist and her husband with two young daughters.
Gianna drove past once after closing.
The new owners had removed the keypad from the pantry.
She laughed when she told me.
“Probably because normal people don’t lock crackers.”
At 11:50 on New Year’s Eve, my phone buzzed.
Austin had sent a photograph.
The brown leather travel bag sat on his apartment table.
I had forgotten I left it at the house after New Year’s Eve.
Beside it was the blue deed folder.
He had kept neither document after closing, only the empty folder.
His message read:
I found this in the last storage box. Do you want it?
I showed Gianna.
She considered it.
“No.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“What should I tell him?”
She took my phone.
For years, I would have answered for both of us.
This time I watched her type.
Keep it if you need the reminder. Throw it away if you don’t.
Austin replied almost immediately.
I think I need it.
Midnight came quietly.
Gianna stepped onto the porch with two mugs of coffee while fireworks flashed beyond the dark hills.
The main conflict was over.
She had been exploited.
Austin had knowingly tried to erase the condition protecting her.
The house was sold.
Her money was returned.
The business survived without his absolute control.
Our grandchildren remained in our lives.
What none of us knew was whether Austin’s accountability would eventually become something deeper than fear of losing things.
Gianna leaned against me.
“Do you think he’ll ever forgive us?”
I looked at the fireworks reflected in the cabin window.
“That isn’t the question I’m asking anymore.”
May you like
She nodded.
At midnight, she turned off her phone, left Austin’s unanswered Sunday call for morning, and carried the empty coffee mugs inside with hands that belonged only to her.
