Chapter 6 - THE DRESS SHE WOULDN’T CHANGE OUT OF.
By noon, the tabloids had it.
Not the real story. The story rich people bought wholesale and distributed before lunch.
HEIRESS WEDDING ENDS IN HOSPITAL DRAMA.
SOCIALITE BRIDE SNAPS.
GROOM’S HAND SHATTERED IN POST-CEREMONY ALTERCATION.
Jessi wasn’t an heiress. She wasn’t a socialite. But once a Voss event put you in enough photos, media laziness did the rest. One outlet described her as “a former financial consultant with a strong personality.” Another quoted an unnamed source saying she had seemed “overwhelmed by the pressures of joining a prominent family.”
Overwhelmed.
That was a pretty word for erased.
Maya made Jessi sit on the office sofa, drink water, and stop refreshing the internet for ten consecutive minutes. Then she outlined the next forty-eight hours like a battlefield map.
No direct contact with Luca or Arthur.
Move all physical evidence to secure storage.
Obtain medical documentation of Jessi’s injuries.
Preserve Patricia’s willingness to cooperate without exposing her prematurely.
Locate the Hudson file.
Most important, get Jessi somewhere Arthur would not think to search first.
“He’ll expect your mother’s,” Maya said.
“He’ll search Elena’s social before he searches mine,” Jessi replied.
“That too.”
So Jessi went to Elena’s after all—but only long enough to change, shower, and become briefly human again.
Elena lived in Astoria above a Dominican bakery that made the whole stairwell smell like butter and sugar by six in the morning. She took one look at Jessi standing in the doorway in a winter coat over a wedding dress and burst into tears before she even got to the insults.
“Oh my God,” she said, hugging her too hard and then holding her at arm’s length. “I knew I hated him. I just didn’t know I was this right.”
Jessi laughed, winced, and finally let the exhaustion hit.
The apartment was small and warm and full of ordinary life—laundry draped over a chair, a half-built Lego set on the coffee table from Elena’s son Mateo, a magnet on the fridge reminding somebody about a parent-teacher conference. Jessi had not realized how suffocating the penthouse had become until she stepped into a place where nobody cared whether coasters matched.
Elena brought her sweatpants, micellar water, and silence until Jessi asked for questions.
There were plenty.
Did Patricia really help?
Was Arthur capable of ruining Rosa?
Would Luca retaliate publicly?
What exactly was a Hudson file, and why did it sound like something that got poor people evicted and rich people reassured?
“I don’t know yet,” Jessi admitted. “But I think it ties the old hospital stuff to something current.”
Elena snorted. “Of course it does. Men like that never stop at one scam. They treat morality like streaming subscriptions—cancel whenever money gets tight.”
After Jessi showered, she stared at the wedding dress hanging from Elena’s shower rod. The lace was smeared at the bodice where her bloody lip had brushed it. One side had a loose bead. The whole dress looked less like romance than evidence.
“Throw it out?” Elena asked from the doorway.
Jessi surprised herself by saying, “No.”
“Sentimental?”
“Angry.”
That made Elena grin.
Jessi folded the dress carefully and packed it into a clean garment bag. Not as nostalgia. As record. The split lip. The blood. The timestamp of a moment they would absolutely try to rewrite.
By late afternoon, Maya had obtained copies of Jessi’s urgent care exam and photographs, plus a preliminary consult from an orthopedic contact willing to review the likely mechanics of Luca’s injury. Self-defense mattered. Force mattered. Sequence mattered. Arthur’s kind of power often lived in vagueness. Jessi intended to choke the vagueness out of every available fact.
The Hudson file surfaced through the laptop around six that evening.
Not because the encryption broke cleanly. Because Jessi recognized the naming logic. Luca, like many arrogant men, confused sophistication with habit. He buried sensitive things under bland labels, but his blandness had preferences. Year. Quarter. Internal region. Asset shorthand. Once she saw enough sibling files, the Hudson trail started to show.
Hudson Harbor Residential.
A portfolio of mixed-income buildings acquired through a distressed-development vehicle three years earlier. Public messaging around the project emphasized modernization, workforce housing preservation, and community investment. Inside the protected folders, the language changed. Benefit reserve reallocations. Deferred maintenance modeling. Litigation exposure tiers. Occupancy churn opportunities.
“Occupancy churn,” Elena repeated. “That sounds like somebody invented a spreadsheet to avoid saying families.”
Exactly.
Jessi kept reading. There were side agreements with contractors connected to older Voss entities. Insurance self-funding layers. Service reductions carefully projected to encourage lower-income tenants to leave voluntarily rather than trigger more expensive formal actions. Most infuriating of all, there was a memo about on-site employees losing legacy health coverage after the restructuring because maintaining the old plan created “inefficient emotional expectations.”
Emotional expectations.
People wanting inhalers, follow-up appointments, and dental cleanings for their kids had become a line item phrase.
No wonder Erin’s brother lost coverage.
No wonder somebody had panicked when Jessi opened the file.
At 7:12 p.m., Maya called with a second development.
“We have a problem and an opportunity,” she said. “Arthur’s team just sent a statement to the press implying you suffered an emotional incident after discovering a prenuptial financial arrangement.”
Jessi closed her eyes. “Gold-digger coded. Nice.”
“Exactly. But the opportunity is Patricia.”
“She talked?”
“Not publicly. Privately. To Helen Rourke.”
Jessi straightened. “She found her?”
“Helen found us. Patricia made contact from a private line. She wants to meet tonight. Not with Arthur. Not with Luca. With you, me, and Helen only.”
“Where?”
“Mercer Presbyterian.”
“The hospital?”
“Patricia says Arthur won’t expect her to ask for psych support in the building he funds.”
Elena muttered from across the room, “Now that’s class warfare.”
Jessi grabbed the document bag, the laptop, and the folded wedding dress.
“Tell Patricia I’m coming.”
Maya’s tone shifted. “There’s one more thing.”
“What?”
“Helen says Patricia kept one item out of the bank box because she couldn’t bear to let it out of her sight.”
Jessi waited.
Maya said, “A check register from Hudson Harbor. Handwritten notes in Arthur’s pen. And next to one transfer he wrote two words.”
“What words?”
May you like
There was a beat.
“Move tenants.”
