Chapter 2 - A Photograph With Her Name
The photographer's flash went off again while the folder lay between Khloe's shoes and Derek's polished oxfords. She bent to pick it up, but a sharp stitch of discomfort ran across her back. Dominic retrieved the folder instead and offered it to her, closed, without reading over her shoulder.
Derek reached for it. "That's proprietary."
"It has my face on it," Khloe answered. "I'll decide what I read."
Derek glanced at the people drifting closer. "Not here."
"You were happy to discuss my behavior here."
He tried a new smile, the one he used with lenders. "You volunteered at Mariner Court. That's all the brochure says. The design team needed a community voice."
Khloe opened the folder. Page one showed a rendering of glass towers rising where the aging brick apartments stood today. Page two called the forty-one occupied apartments "substantially vacated." Page three featured her photograph beneath a paragraph praising a smooth, resident-supported transition. She recognized the image: Mrs. Inez Reed had twisted her ankle on a grocery run last spring, and Khloe had carried her bags up three flights because the elevator was out again.
That ordinary act of kindness now appeared to endorse the demolition of Mrs. Reed's home.
"I didn't authorize this," Khloe said.
"You signed the publicity waiver at the neighborhood breakfast," Derek replied.
"For the food pantry. Not for evictions."
Dominic's face became unreadable. "Who approved the resident-support language?"
Derek swallowed. "My communications team."
"Then your communications team needs to hear what the person in that photograph just said."
"Dominic," Derek began, pitching his voice low, "this is a misunderstanding between husband and wife."
"That photograph isn't a marriage," Dominic said. "It's a claim made to an investor."
Khloe shut the folder. The crowd was now pretending to resume dinner, which meant every phone in the ballroom would be full of speculation by morning. She didn't want one more minute under the chandeliers.
"I need a seat," she said.
Dominic signaled to an attendant. A chair appeared beside the coat-check alcove, along with water. Khloe sat slowly and waited through a brief tightening in her abdomen. The baby moved again. It passed. She took a drink and called her friend Tasha, whose name was the first one she could trust to appear on her phone.
Tasha answered on the second ring. "You're at the gala. Is everything okay?"
"I'm leaving Derek. Can I stay with you tonight?"
No shocked questions. "I'm clearing the couch. Do you need me to come get you?"
"A ride is being arranged. I'm okay."
"Text me when you leave and when you arrive."
Khloe hung up, relieved by the mundane efficiency of someone who loved her.
Dominic was still waiting a respectful few steps away. "My driver can take you wherever you say. I'll arrange a separate car for myself."
"Why are you doing this?" she asked.
He considered the folder. "Because I've been told every family in Mariner Court agreed to move. My company has already advanced money on that representation."
"They haven't. Mrs. Reed would sleep in the lobby before she gave up her apartment. Her husband laid the tiles in their kitchen."
"Is the building safe?"
"The rear stairwell floods. The elevator fails every other week. The landlord calls it deferred maintenance. The residents call it Tuesday." She touched the folder. "I wasn't helping Derek with his bid. I was delivering groceries."
"Then somebody turned a photograph into permission." Dominic looked directly at her. "I won't ask you to fix my deal. But I want this reviewed."
He handed her a card with an office number, not a demand or a promise to make everything disappear.
Derek appeared once more as Khloe stood. "Come home. We can work this out."
"I don't feel safe discussing anything with you alone right now."
"You're overreacting. That kiss is going to be everywhere."
"So is a document that uses my name. I care more about the second."
Vanessa watched silently from the doorway, her red dress stark against the cream wall. When Khloe met her eyes, Vanessa looked away first.
Outside, rain stippled the awning. In the car, Khloe gave Tasha's address and then placed her palm over the baby's steady movements. She sent Tasha a photograph of the folder's cover and the first three pages. She sent the same images to her own email. She had learned that when Derek wanted to win an argument, a missing document could become a document that had never existed.
Tasha lived in a two-bedroom apartment above a family-owned bakery. The air smelled of yeast and orange peel even at midnight. She opened the door in an old sweatshirt, took one look at Khloe's face, and held her without asking who had won the ballroom confrontation.
"The video is already online," Tasha said when they sat down with tea. "I'm not going to show it unless you want to see it."
"I don't." Khloe removed her heels and saw red crescents pressed into her ankles. "I want to know whether forty-one families are about to lose their homes because Derek used a picture of me."
Tasha, a public school librarian, had helped her run the Mariner Court pantry for a year. She knew the residents by name and remembered every elevator outage because it forced volunteers to carry food upstairs.
"Mrs. Reed called yesterday," she said. "A man from Derek's office told her the building was going to be declared empty next week. She said she was standing in her kitchen while he told her."
Khloe stared at her.
"There's more," Tasha said. "The rear exit was chained shut for two days after the last flood. Mr. Alvarez took a picture."
"Which Mr. Alvarez?"
"The one in apartment seventeen. He called me because his daughter's stroller couldn't fit through the front doorway while the repairs were happening."
Khloe remembered the little girl waving from a second-floor window, wearing a paper crown she'd made from a cereal box. The proposal's rendering showed that window replaced by a luxury gym.
Her phone lit up with a message from Derek: COME HOME OR THE ACCOUNTS CLOSE IN THE MORNING.
She took a screenshot and forwarded it to her personal email. Then she opened a notebook Tasha had used to track pantry deliveries. Dates, apartment numbers, the names of people who had received groceries: proof of who was still living there.
At the bottom of last Tuesday's page, Tasha had written something else.
WATER REACHED THE YELLOW LINE AGAIN. REAR DOOR WOULD NOT OPEN.
"What yellow line?" Khloe asked.
May you like
"Mrs. Reed painted it herself," Tasha said. "After the last flood, so nobody could tell her she'd imagined how high the water got."
Khloe closed the notebook. Derek's shiny rendering was one version of Mariner Court. The yellow line was another. She knew which one she wanted an independent inspector to see.
