Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 67675 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 338(@200wpm)___ 271(@250wpm)___ 226(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67675 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 338(@200wpm)___ 271(@250wpm)___ 226(@300wpm)
2
CAMI
The cameras in the courtroom didn’t miss a thing. I sat glued to the television set, watching as the jury filed back into the courtroom. A closeup of my parents interlocked hands tightening, both sets of knuckles going white. A shot of my mother that was so close I could’ve seen her pores if her skin hadn’t been immaculate. Then the camera panned to the attorneys approaching the bench. The judge frowning at the form the jury foreman handed her, shaking her head. My stomach knotted up. What did it mean?
The news commentator didn’t know either. Her voice was hesitant, so different from the smooth, pronounced voice she usually spoke in. “I think—yes, Judge Pennington is sending the jurors back. There appears to be a mistake on the form. I don’t–we’ll have to wait and see. Impossible to tell which side–” she trailed off.
I wanted to scream, but my vocal cords were paralyzed. It took fifteen agonizing minutes before the jury returned. Judge Pennington nodded crisply at the new form. The attorneys approached the bench again. Another shot of my parents. Robert’s face was impossible to read, as always. Only someone who knew him as well as I did would know he was worried. It was the white line around his flattened lips, the slight bulge in his cheeks that came from clenching his jaws that gave it away to me. My mother’s face was an open book though. Her eyes, appealingly wide, radiated hopeful innocence. She gave a small nod as the jury foreman cleared his throat, like she was encouraging a small child to take a very brave step forward.
I thought she had them in the palm of her hand, where she kept everyone she’d ever met. Until recently. I squeezed my arms tightly around myself and paced back and forth across the spacious, high-ceilinged room, unable to sit still. I barely heard the foreman’s voice spelling out the first charge, I was so focused on hearing him absolve my parents of this terrible misunderstanding that I almost didn’t understand what I’d heard when he said the opposite.
I stopped and whirled on the television screen. My eyes searched desperately for some sign that I’d misheard him. I expected to see relief etched on my mother’s beautiful face. A ghost of a smile on Robert’s thin lips. Instead, they were pressed tighter than ever, and my mother was weeping.
She was a beautiful crier. Some people’s faces turned red and blotchy, their eyes puffed up, and their noses ran. Not hers. Single tear drops slipped over the curve of her high cheekbones, clung to her gorgeously sharp jawline. Robert handed her a handkerchief with the initials RVL monogrammed in the corner. Only Robert Vernon Lavigne still kept a monogrammed handkerchief on him at all times. I could feel it as though it was my hand he pressed it into. A soft silky square with permanently pressed creases, just like the ones I’d cried into when I failed my driver’s test, when my prom date stood me up, when I fell in love with a man who would never love me back.
I ached to be there with them. I desperately wanted to stand between my mother and that horrible cameraman who kept focusing on her despair. I wanted to wrap my arms around Robert’s elegantly spare frame and feel him pat his back, as though it were him reassuring me and not the other way around.
How could the jury have found them guilty of all those things they were accused of? My mother could be scatterbrained, that was true. Maybe the company had outpaced her ability to keep her eye on every little detail, but she hadn’t purposefully misled people. She’d really thought that Lavigne was their ticket to financial independence, the way it had been for her.
I was shocked by the verdict, but the amount awarded in damages to the plaintiffs landed like a sucker punch in my midsection. I literally gasped and folded my hands over my stomach. Two hundred million dollars.
Two hundred million dollars.
Even Robert’s face flickered with horror. His mouth formed a pursed O, and his eyebrows climbed up his forehead. My mother gasped and covered her mouth with one hand. Her nails were perfectly filed ovals, painted in her signature color of Chanel Le Vernis Ballerina. She paid a small fortune to keep her preferred manicurist by her side when she traveled. When she needed her hair color touched up, she flew in her favorite stylist from Paris. I couldn’t even calculate how much she spent a month on beauty. It wasn’t a luxury for my mother–it was an essential. Or at least, it had been. Everything was about to change for her.
For some reason, that brought the first tears to my eyes. It would all have to go, wouldn’t it? Not just the manicurist and the stylist, but the houses, the cars, the boats, and the fantastically expensive evening gowns, too. The company’s value had sunk like a stone when the lawsuits first started coming in. There were rumors that the company’s debts outweighed its assets, and now this. A two hundred million wrecking ball was sinking into the life she’d built for herself.