Mara Sterling: My Deal with Desire

CHAPTER 60

POV Cyrus

They said the city had never seen a funeral like it. Maybe they were right. Motorcades and black umbrellas, camera cranes and heads bowed for the perfect shot, cathedral bells measured out like a steady reprimand. The world arrived dressed in contrition and couture. The eulogies were tasteful, the flowers expensive, the grief—mine—unbiddable.

From the front pew, I watched men who’d negotiated against Helena for decades rise to call her a visionary. Governors who had dodged her phone calls quoted her as if conscience were contagious. A bishop with immaculate hands invoked mercy. Across the aisle, CEOs practiced solemnity like a second language. I knew half of their security details by name. Every lens in the sanctuary behaved like an eye that forgives when properly fed.

Mara sat at my left, black veil lowered, hands clenched on the program until the cardstock bent. She didn’t cry during the service. She’d spent her tears when the paramedics finally stopped pretending. The veil moved when she breathed; otherwise she was carved patience.

Lucian read from Ecclesiastes, voice unsteady only on the word season. When he stepped down, he squeezed my shoulder with a pressure coded in a language we learned long before boardrooms. Maeve refused to speak and instead placed Helena’s pearl rosary on the coffin with a hand that did not shake.

Outside, the reporters waited at the cathedral steps, a wall we would need to walk through. You could feel their hunger, the way a storm can be felt before it’s heard. The first question tried to sound reverent and came out like accusation: “Mr. Blackwell—do you accept responsibility?”

I could have said a thousand things. I had written none of them. Responsibility is a word that attracts lawsuits and erases nuance; it is also the only word that has a chance of saving a soul.

“I accept grief,” I said. “And I accept the work of finishing what my mother started.”

A murmur. The follow-up came armed. “Then why did your security fail? Why was she at the villa at all? Did your war bring this to her door?”

“My war?” I repeated, the corners of my vision tightening. “You mistake it. She named the enemy long before I learned to pronounce it.”

Mara didn’t speak. I felt the heat of her next to me, the restraint she wears like armor. A reporter with a tasteful cruet of outrage turned toward her. “Ms. Sterling—your silence has been taken as guilt by some—”

“She won’t be taking questions,” I said, and the look she gave me—grief and gratitude and warning—told me I had exactly one more of those interventions left in this lifetime.

We rode to the burial in a car that smelled of lilies and raincoats. The sky couldn’t decide if it wanted to bless or punish. Lucerne’s lake wore a gray scowl. The drivers moved in practiced unison; motorcade choreography is just mourning with turn signals.

On the way, I sent the statement. Effective immediately, I am stepping down as CEO of Sterling-Blackwell for a period of personal reflection and transition. Helena had always despised euphemism. Today, it was a shield I could stomach.

The phone lit like a burning field. Board members texted question marks followed by dollar signs. Shareholders called, their vocabulary limited to stability and fiduciary. Rafe’s reply came with no punctuation: smart for optics dumb for leverage call me before night. Tess sent a single skull and a heart and then a link to a streamer calling my resignation “the first honest thing he’s done.”

Lucian leaned forward from the jump seat. “You’ll terrify the markets.”

“They’re already terrified,” I said. “This tells them fear has a purpose.”

“It also tells enemies we’ve shed armor,” he said.

“Maybe they’ll shoot at the coat and forget the man.”

“Or the man will learn to live without the coat,” Mara said, voice low, eyes on the window. We both turned to look. She didn’t move. “She didn’t raise us for costumes.”

The cemetery lay on a hill above the lake, stones like tired teeth, yews cutting the wind into formal shapes. The grave was pre-dug, the sod stacked neatly like a polite threat. The coffin looked smaller outside the cathedral, as if the sky refused to be impressed.

The family plot is a map of ambition and accident. My father, who taught me numbers before he taught me grace. My grandfather, whose handshake owned cities. A great-aunt who pretended to be worse than she was to survive men who mistook that for invitation. Now Helena, who built a scalpel out of her last name and knew where to cut.

The priest said the words. The pallbearers obeyed gravity. When the coffin lowered, a sound rose from the crowd I didn’t expect: an exhale, almost relieved. Not because she was gone; because finality is easier to live with than suspense. I hated them for a heartbeat. Then I remembered hatred is a sandstorm; it scours what you mean to build.

Reporters stayed at a tasteful perimeter. Long lenses tried to behave. A little wind lifted Mara’s veil; she didn’t push it down. The lake flipped a coin with the light and both sides came up gray.

A quaver in the line of donors. A whisper that carried despite itself: “He’s stepping down to avoid liability.” Another: “If Helena had been in New York—” Another: “This is on him.”

Whispers travel like disease. I let them, because trying to arrest them would turn me into exactly what they wanted: a tantrum in a good suit. I laid my hand on the polished wood and felt the craftsmanship, the absurdity of it—how well we prepare boxes for bodies we never learned to honor when they were loud.

When the crowd thinned and the cameras retreated to edit indignation into segments, Mara and I were finally alone. The groundskeeper, a man who had perfected invisibility, melted into the hedge line. Snow started again—fine, insistent, unshowy.

She stepped to the very edge of the grave, as close as a daughter dares. Her voice, when it came, was almost conversational. “You always said I should cut the cake first at parties so the guests feel permitted to eat.” She swallowed. “Consider this the first slice.”

I stood beside her, shoulders touching. Helena was between us and beneath us and behind us. “They’ll blame me,” I said.

“They already did,” she answered. “You can’t outpace a verdict that was written before the trial.”

“I can accept that,” I said. “I can’t accept that she doesn’t get to see what comes next.”

“She saw it,” Mara said, and I knew she meant the letters, the plan, the way Helena lifted her chin around hard truths. “She wrote part of it.”

“Then we owe her an ending that isn’t Beck’s,” I said.

Her breath made a small cloud in the cold. “I can’t be careful anymore,” she said. “Careful kept me alive. It also kept me quiet.”

“I don’t want you careful,” I said before I could varnish it. “I want you here.”

She looked at me then, fully, and I saw the color in her grief—fury and faith and a humor that refuses to die. “Here doesn’t mean safe.”

“I know,” I said. The words scraped. “We either let him finish this story or we write the ending ourselves.”

Her eyes returned to the coffin. A snowflake landed on the wood and thought about melting. “Then we start a war called truth.”

“Truth is a thin shield,” I said.

“It’s the only one that doesn’t rot,” she said, wiping the snowflake with her glove like a benediction.

We stood long enough for the groundskeeper to pretend to cough, the universal signal that grief must make room for shovels. Mara stepped back first, her hand finding mine as if my name were written in the air above it. The lake turned a shade darker. Somewhere down the hill, a car door closed with the soft respect of good training.

“Tonight,” I said, as we started down the path between markers. “We leak the Phoenix charter. We fund it with what I can still reach. We call the regulators who admit they need proof, not theater.”

“And the theater?” she asked.

“We burn it down,” I said.

She nodded. The veil snagged on a low branch; I freed it, a small, ridiculous intimacy in a day carved by larger ones. “You stepping down,” she said, not a question.

“Optics,” I answered, and the word tasted like water with iron in it. “And penance.”

“You think penance works like math,” she said.

“I think it works like habit,” I said. “And I am good at habits.”

At the gate, Lucian waited, tie absent, eyes red. He didn’t try to joke. “Car’s ready,” he said. “Reporters took pity on themselves and left.”

“We’re not giving statements,” I said.

“I told them you were becoming monks,” he said, and the corner of his mouth remembered how to lift. “They didn’t get it.”

He peeled off toward the motorcade. The wind shifted. I heard the faint whine before I saw it—the particular pitch of a machine that sold its soul for stability. I glanced up out of reflex. The sky held nothing but light snow and a winter bird that hadn’t read the migration memos.

We turned from the grave, hand in hand, boots finding purchase on the frozen path. My phone buzzed—Rafe, Tess, a senator who had discovered decency late. I let it buzz. The trees bracketed the view into a frame that would look dignified on the evening news.

I said, “We go home,” and Mara squeezed my hand once, the kind of squeeze that carries both agreement and contingency.

We walked under the arch of bare branches. I heard it again—the thin electric whir—to our left this time. I looked, frowning, and saw it crest the line of yews: small, black, professional; a drone with a gimbal eye and a transmitter belly, steady in the wind like it had practiced.

Before I could speak, it tilted, as if nodding to us, lens irising like an animal scenting blood.

As they walk away, a drone camera pans across the cemetery—transmitting live to Beck’s hidden feed.