Chapter 15 - THE TABLE WITHOUT A QUEEN
Ten months after Jolene ordered her to wash her feet, Sloan hosted dinner in the Tribeca penthouse.
Six people.
No Mercer family.
No business negotiations.
No one wearing sequins.
Sloan made pasta badly enough that her friend Katherine ordered backup food before dessert.
The chandelier was still there.
The cream chair had been professionally cleaned.
The marble seam where the basin struck remained faintly chipped.
Sloan could have repaired it.
She hadn’t bothered.
Her divorce from Vance had become final three weeks earlier.
The postnuptial agreement held.
The penthouse remained hers.
Mercer House made the scheduled loan payments.
First Hudson’s restructuring facility remained in place.
Vance still worked there.
Jolene did not.
Tinsley did.
Sloan had not seen any of them in person for four months.
That was intentional.
She had also stopped introducing herself as Sloan Mercer professionally.
She returned to Hale.
Not as a dramatic rejection.
It was simply her name before she spent six years making room for another family inside it.
After dinner, Sloan carried glasses toward the kitchen.
Her phone buzzed on the counter.
An email.
From: Tinsley Mercer
Sloan almost deleted it.
She opened it instead.
I’m not writing because Mom told me to. She told me not to write until I was ready to say what I did without explaining it.
Sloan kept reading.
I tried to hit you because I believed you were taking something from us. I understand now that the thing I was really afraid of losing was a life I thought I deserved because of my last name. I’m sorry I attacked you. I’m sorry I helped Mom humiliate you. I’m not asking you to forgive me.
At the bottom:
If you ever want coffee, I’ll come alone. If not, I will leave you alone.
Sloan put the phone down.
Katherine called from the dining room:
“Do you own coffee too, or do we need legal documents before I make some?”
Sloan laughed.
“Kitchen cabinet. Help yourself.”
She looked around the penthouse.
For years Vance had called it his because saying otherwise embarrassed him.
Jolene had treated it like family property because Sloan’s boundaries offended her.
Tinsley had defended a claim she never checked.
Sloan had responded by becoming increasingly obsessed with proving what was hers.
Now the apartment felt different.
Not because the deed had changed.
Because she no longer needed ownership to win an argument.
It was simply home.
Sloan picked up Tinsley’s email again.
She did not answer.
Not that night.
Maybe she never would.
Or maybe one day they would sit across from each other somewhere neutral, with no mothers, husbands, loans, penthouses, or family names between them.
Sloan left the message unread on her screen for another moment.
Then she locked the phone and returned to the dining room.
Nobody was seated at the head of the table.
May you like
Nobody had been assigned a place.
And for the first time since Sloan bought the penthouse, that felt exactly right.
