Chapter 7 - The Fountain of Ashes
Piedmont Park was nearly empty under the pale November sun, the dead leaves of the oak trees scattering across the stone paths as the wind swept down from the midtown skyline. The great stone fountain at the center of the terrace was dry, its concrete basins filled with nothing but frost and withered ivy.
Camille Bennett stood near the stone ledge, wrapped in a massive white cashmere coat that looked like a wedding dress that had lost its joy. Her hair was uncombed, her eyes dark and hollow behind large designer sunglasses. She looked like a ghost inhabiting a memory.
When she heard Adrian’s boots clicking against the stone, she spun around, her sunglasses slipping down her nose. A flash of frantic, desperate hope lit her face.
“Adrian!” she cried, rushing forward, her hands reaching for his chest. “I knew you’d come. You’re too good a man to let them destroy me. You’re the only one who can save us. Your mother’s company... she has billions, Adrian! If she pays the restitution fee to the Illinois fund, the DOJ will drop the criminal charges against my father! We can still have the wedding, Adrian! In a smaller church, quietly, next month!”
Adrian stopped three feet away, his hands deep in his coat pockets. He didn't reach out to touch her. He looked at her face, looking for the woman he had spent eight months loving, but he found nothing but a void wrapped in expensive fabric.
“The restitution fee is forty million dollars, Camille,” Adrian said, his voice flat, matching the gray stones of the dry fountain. “And my mother isn't paying a single cent to buy your father out of a federal penitentiary.”
Camille’s hands dropped to her sides, her face transforming into a sharp, twisted mask of fury. “Then why did you come here? To gloat? To watch the great Camille Bennett beg in a park?”
“I came to give you this,” Adrian said.
He pulled his hand out of his pocket and placed a small, velvet box on the stone ledge of the fountain between them. It was the three-carat diamond ring she had left on the table at the Peachtree Club.
“The ring belongs to your family’s estate now,” Adrian said. “The federal receivers will need it to pay the initial administrative fees for your mother’s medical care. I’ve already instructed my lawyers to ensure your mother’s private room at the facility in Savannah is paid for through the end of the year. That is the only charity the Bennett family will ever receive from the Okafor name.”
Camille stared at the box, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps. “You think you’re so holy, Adrian? You grew up in the dirt! Your father was a thief who ran away to the coast! You would be nothing in this city without the doors my father opened for you!”
“My father was a thief, Camille,” Adrian said, turning his back on her as he looked toward the skyline where the Okafor logistics trucks were moving down the highway in the distance. “But he never wore a white dress and called his theft a sacrament. I built my company with my own hands, cubic yard by cubic yard, while your father was trading people’s lives for zoning variances. The doors your family opened were always traps. I’m just glad my mother showed me the key before the lock turned.”
“I hate you!” Camille screamed behind him, her voice echoing off the concrete terrace as he began to walk away down the path. “I hate your mother! I hate everything you are!”
Adrian didn't look back. He walked down the hill toward the waiting SUV where Ifeoma sat in the passenger seat, her silver-gray eyes watching him through the glass with a profound, quiet pride.
As he climbed into the driver’s seat, he looked at his mother and smiled—a real, genuine smile that reached his eyes for the first time in twenty-six years.
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“Where to, CEO?” Ifeoma asked, her tone light, full of the warmth that had been missing from his life for a generation.
“Home, Mother,” Adrian said, shifting the vehicle into drive. “Let’s go back to the house where the windows look at the sky, not the neighbors.”
