Chapter 2: Sunday Supper 🌶️

Ever since she’d started college, she didn’t come back to the Halloway estate much. Skipping a Sunday Supper wasn’t anything new. But Owen, as the eldest son, was supposed to be there. The two of them vanishing at the same time wasn’t going to fly.
Helena had been angry first, then worried, half-convinced they’d been in a wreck. Edmund had been the one to calm her down. With Edmund present, things never got out of hand. He’d told everyone to sit, and the dinner finished quietly. No one brought it up again.
When Owen was being a federal prosecutor, he was all sharp suit, cold face, sharper eyes, spoke as little as he could. Aloof and authoritative. The second he was in bed, he was a different man. He had her in positions she’d never imagined and said things to her she’d never imagined. He wasn’t untouchable anymore. He was a depraved man in a fine suit who couldn’t get enough of her body.
She’d barely caught her breath before she heard him on the phone again, an associate giving him an update on the online sex-trafficking case.
He set the phone down. He saw her looking. He knew she’d heard everything. Before he could say anything she said, in her flat schoolyard voice, “My father is innocent.”
“Evidence?”
“If he were really the man behind it, the case would have been closed eleven years ago. Why is it suddenly back?”
He shut that down without effort. “We catch murderers all the time. People still get murdered.”
“You know that’s not the point. Don’t twist what I’m saying.” She got worked up the second this came up. “He was the scapegoat. There’s no way the evidence pointed to exactly one person. Doesn’t that strike you as off? He was good to me, he loved me — he couldn’t have done this…”
“The first part I’ll let go.” His face didn’t change. “The last part I hear in court every day. Addie. Whether or not he loved you has nothing to do with whether he committed the crime. A lot of these guys ended up dirty because of their kids.”
“I know…” her voice dropped. “Then if the new case is connected — if he was wrongly convicted — can it be reopened?”
“I’m not there yet.”
“If it can be — would you—”
He put his hand over her mouth before she could finish. He leaned over her. “Stop asking. What I let you hear was enough.”
After that they got dressed and went out. Out of the suite they looked perfectly put together. The bed was the only thing left wrecked.
Owen dropped her off at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He told her he’d pick her up after work. She said she was staying late.
A 3L summer intern who’d just started — what was she really going to be busy with? Owen knew it, but he didn’t push. He had his own work to get to. He left.
The 2014 federal exploitation case that had blown up across the country had dragged the Beaumonts into a spotlight they couldn’t crawl out of. Addie had been ten the day the FBI walked through their front door and took her father out in cuffs. The cameras had been a wall, and they didn’t care that she was a child. They photographed her with the rest of the household. To them she was an extension of the indicted U.S. Attorney — an original sin in a school uniform. The neighbors at the Buckhead house started yelling at her over the fence. The kids at her private school started shoving her in the halls. Eventually they moved out of the old place, she switched schools, and years went by, and things quieted.
Eleven years later. Apparently people still remembered. In the meeting this morning, the other interns kept looking at her, then whispering.
Addie didn’t acknowledge any of it. She couldn’t control other people’s mouths. Live and let live.
But the U.S. Attorney’s Office had a lot of well-connected hires, and a lot of them were old-family kids who remembered the Beaumont scandal from eleven years ago — who even remembered her name. One of them decided to use it.
“Operation Nightingale, 2014. Anyone remember? The webcam exploitation case.”
“Of course. The one that took down Augustus Beaumont. He was U.S. Attorney for the Northern District — he was protecting traffickers and taking bribes. Thank God they finally got him. They threw the book at him, twenty-two years federal.”
Adelaide’s face went white. Her body went stiff. The little group across the conference room got bolder when they saw it.
“They seized everything — property, accounts. Three generations of Beaumonts can’t scrub that name clean.”
“They arrested him in the foyer of the house. The wife took off. Left a daughter behind. Sad story.”
“What’s sad about it? He was bribing for sex trafficking. That’s not sad. That’s deserved.”
Adelaide could let a lot of things go. Not this.
She pushed her chair back and walked over to them. Quiet, one syllable at a time.
“Shut. Up.”
The girl closest to her rolled her eyes. “We’re discussing a case. Mind your business. Who do you think you are? The disgraced traffic-money girl, that’s who.”
She kept her grip on herself. Just barely.
The other two looked her over with open disgust. “Honestly, I don’t know how you got hired here. If you’re really Augustus Beaumont’s daughter, your SF-86 background check shouldn’t have cleared.”
“Like father like daughter — probably got in the same shady way he did.”
“God. Dirty.”
Blood rushed to her head. The room tipped. She marched back to her chair, grabbed the heavy glass water pitcher, and threw it straight at them.
The conference room went off like a bomb.
Then the screaming started.
The U.S. Marshals heard it. The supervisor heard it. Every intern got chewed out. The ones in the fight got pulled into a side office to give statements, then sent to file in the records room to “think about it.”
The pitcher hadn’t hit anyone, fortunately, or someone’s head would’ve split. But the trio she’d thrown it at weren’t going to drop it. They wanted to escalate. They wanted Addie to pay damages. Eventually it got smoothed over and she was asked to write a written apology. She wrote it. She didn’t actually apologize.
She knew they wouldn’t let it go. One was the Atlanta Deputy Mayor’s nephew. One was the APD Commissioner’s daughter. The third was somebody else equally connected. They had said it out loud: “A whore like you doesn’t belong in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Whose dick did you suck to get in? Watch — I’ll report you. I’ll bury you.”
But she wasn’t scared. She didn’t know exactly why. She just wasn’t.
The next day every senior AUSA and the section head had a conversation with her, one after another, advising her to step down from the internship. She refused.
After that, no one talked to her. Everyone gave her a wide berth or whispered when she walked past. She didn’t react. She did her work. She had a kind of composure people noticed.
She had been called worse from younger than this. The current cold shoulder was nothing.
But it was getting bigger — someone had filed a formal complaint with the DOJ Office of the Inspector General up in Washington, saying she was the daughter of convicted federal felon Augustus Beaumont and there was no way her SF-86 should have cleared. Something was rotten.
Everyone in the office figured she’d brought it on herself. With a record like hers in the family, she was supposed to keep her head down. She’d carried herself like a princess and now she’d burned herself. Served her right.
DOJ OIG was efficient. Three days after the complaint went up, the verdict came back.
Everyone in the office was bracing for the office to get reprimanded. They wanted to see who the actual god behind her was.
The verdict landed and nobody could believe it.
Adelaide Beaumont’s legal guardian was not Augustus Beaumont. Her SF-86 had cleared correctly. The complainants were under investigation for false reporting and frivolous filing, and the matter was being handed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s own ethics counsel. As for the allegations that she’d slept her way in — too vague, no evidence, dropped.
Hell of a reversal.
If Augustus had still been the same Augustus, no one would have flinched. They’d have been bowing to her. But he’d been in a federal prison for eleven years and nobody had bowed in a decade. They turned again. Said it was karma, justice was real, the truth won out. Privately they said Adelaide Beaumont definitely had someone backing her, and that someone wasn’t smaller than the Beaumonts of the old days. Maybe bigger.
What they didn’t know was that to make it all go away, Addie had spent the last several nights at Owen’s place.
She’d been giving him the cold shoulder that morning, told him not to pick her up. By the evening she was the one calling.
The second he picked up he made a small sound. “Mm?”
Low. Drawn out. As if he’d known.
She never called him first unless she wanted something. He could guess what.
“Are you done for the night?”
“Not yet.” Slow. “Why.”
“I just… wanted to ask. You going back to the place tonight?”
The place. He knew which place.
He laughed, low. The voice got smoother. “Do you want me there, or not?”
She wasn’t going to answer that. “Whatever. I’m going to the place anyway.”