Chapter 2 Who I Am Now (3Years Later)

• Gh Chapter Two: Who I Am Now ( 3 years later)
• The coffee in Zurich is better than anywhere I’ve ever lived.
• That’s not a small observation seeing as I’d spent thirty-four years drinking whatever was convenient and now I sit in the same window seat every morning with something that costs fourteen francs and tastes like it knows something about me, and I think — this is what it feels like to choose.
• Everything I do now is a choice.
• My name is Celeste Vayne.
• It isn’t, but it is.
• I’m the woman who answers to it, who signs the documents, who owns the apartment on the fourth floor with the view of the lake and I’m as real as they come.
• I built her the way you build anything that needs to last which was from the foundation up and with no shortcuts.
• Mara Ellison is dead, Buried, actually, seeing as I have her death certificate.
• I ordered it myself.
• My hair is different now, it’s shorter and darker, with a color shade that screams class and doesn’t invite conversation.
• I lost weight in the first year without trying and then gained it back differently, in the way that happens when you start eating better.
• My face is mostly the same except for the nose, which a very discreet surgeon in Prague adjusted so subtly that the only people who would notice are people who had been looking at it for years.
• Daniel looked at me for twenty-two years and I’ve decided I’m not taking chances to look like anything he’ll recognize.
• The laptop open in front of me has four tabs. Three of them are his company’s investor filings, his quarterly reports, the profile piece a business magazine ran on him eight months ago under the headline The Self-Made Man Who Built An Empire From Nothing.
• I read that one a few times.
• From nothing?
• That’s interesting seeing as I have a very specific memory of the night he came home with the seed funding for Ellison Capital and how his hands were shaking.
• I vividly remember how I sat across from him at the kitchen table and went through every line of the pitch deck until two in the morning and told him which numbers were wrong and which story to tell instead.
• He had took notes and used them. He walked into that meeting the next day and came home with four million dollars and took me to dinner to celebrate and never once, in any of the interviews he’s given since, mentioned that part.
• I’m not bitter about it.
• Bitter implies I still want something from him and honestly I don’t want anything from that bastard except what I’m already taking.
• The fourth tab is his new wife.
• Taska who was Twenty-nine, former associate at the firm, and Pretty in a way that photographs well and dims in person.
• I don’t hate her the way you might expect me to. She’s not interesting enough for me to spend my hate on her.
• However what she is, is useful — she’s been Daniel’s weakness since before he decided I was more convenient dead than divorced, and weakness is the thing I’ve been studying and banking on for the last three years.
• I know his weaknesses the way I know his tells and his bad habits.
• The way his jaw tightens when he feels cornered. The way he orders a second drink when the first conversation hasn’t gone the way he planned.
• The way he makes decisions fast when he’s scared and calls it confidence.
• He’s scared right now, that much is clear from the filings.
• Ellison Capital has a problem. Two problems, actually. The first being a Singapore deal that fell through in October and a US investor who pulled out quietly in January, and the combination has left a gap in their portfolio that is going to become visible, very soon, to the kind of people whose visibility Daniel cannot afford.
• He needs new money.
• He needs large foreign money, the type that comes with enough distance that due diligence takes longer.
• The kind that lets him stabilize before anyone starts asking questions he can’t answer.
• And that comes with a foreign investor that will pay no attention to the failings of his company and would invest huge amounts blindly.
• I’ve been waiting for this specific window for fourteen months and I don’t plan to waste a single minute of this. I close the laptop.
• Outside, the lake is doing its thing and totally unbothered, the way only very old bodies of water can be. I remember watching it a lot in the beginning, when I was still figuring out how to sleep in a room without listening for footsteps and dreaming about being stuck in a coffin underground.
• The lake had helped and It just is what it is.
• I pull up my phone and open the message thread with my attorney.
• Meeting confirmed, he’s written. Ellison’s team reached out this morning. They’re eager.
• Of course they fucking are. I’m the only hope of those bunch of about-to-be-debtors.
• I type back: Tell them I’ll be in New York Thursday.
• Three years ago I crawled out of the ground in a ruined dress with a broken wrist and nothing else.
• No phone, no ID, no money, no name. The man who pulled me out of the river — I’ll call him a good person and leave it there — gave me dry clothes and didn’t ask questions when I said I needed to get to a bus station.
• I paid him back eventually, anonymously of course and Three times what he would have asked for.
• The money came from Daniel, which is the part I find most satisfying. Although it wasn’t directly, like everything I do now, including the offshore account I knew about and he didn’t know I knew about, the one he kept for the kind of expenses that don’t benefit from documentation — I had found my way to it.
• It took eight months and two people I will never name in any context.
• It was more than enough to become Celeste.
• Celeste made more money than she could possibly need, even if she didn’t make any of it personally, she did earn it.
• Celeste had invested Daniel's secret offshore funds carefully and waited and made more again, and now Celeste has the kind of money that makes men like Daniel sit up straight in meetings and say yes, of course, whatever you need.
• I stand up from the window seat and leave the fourteen-franc coffee half finished.
• I have a flight to pack for.
• I caught my reflection in the glass on the way out, chestnut brown hair, a calm face with a surgically augmented nose and forehead, the small silver scar on the inside of my left wrist where the bone healed slightly wrong.
• I keep it visible on purpose.
• I look nothing like Mara, the stupid wife Daniel had buried alive after he drugged her.
• I look nothing like the stupid version of me who had once believed Daniel would eventually love and cherish her.
• Mara Ellison is dead.
• I’m Celeste Vayne and Daniel has no idea what’s coming to him.