28. Sunk Cost

Entitlement and Precedent

The Social Ledger, September 4, 2010

The coffee shop hums with the chaotic optimism of syllabus week. Students shuffle between tables with oversized lattes and fresh notebooks still crisp at the spine. Elizabeth sits perfectly still in the leather armchair by the window, her posture immaculate, her attention fixed on Ashley’s phone as though the screen has violated some fundamental rule, she always assumed was permanent.

The image is grainy and unguarded—a candid captured somewhere in London showing Michael stepping into a black car with Molly at his side and Asuka trailing just behind. The three of them move together with the kind of fluid coordination that speaks to something deeper than coincidence. The composition is unmistakable: a closed formation marked by intention and cohesion; bodies angled toward one another in a way that excludes the rest of the world entirely.

Ashley laughs softly, tilting her head as she studies the photo. “They look cute together, honestly. Very European.”

Elizabeth does not see affection. She sees alignment without permission.

What unsettles her is not that Michael moved on—she anticipated that possibility, even prepared herself for the eventual tabloid confirmation—but that he did so cleanly, without visible cost, without the stumbling grief or public awkwardness that should have followed the dissolution of what they shared. He constructed something new, something that functions, and he did so with a structure that does not include her. As if Molly, with her freckled shoulders and that ridiculous red hair, could somehow replace what Elizabeth offered him.

She evaluates the women beside him with detached efficiency, cataloging their features and their proximity and the way they seem to orbit him without deference, and then she discards the comparison altogether because their individual value is irrelevant. Their presence is the offense. Their closeness is the insult.

The Serbia incident should have changed things. The whispers about the festival, the questions about what really happened in Novi Sad—all of it should have clung to him like smoke, should have made people wonder whether Michael Stewart was worth the trouble he seems to attract. But the story evaporated within weeks, replaced by Olympic nostalgia and magazine covers and the relentless forward momentum of his carefully managed image. The smear gained no traction. The chaos left no mark. And now here he is, stepping into luxury vehicles with beautiful women as though nothing has ever threatened him at all.

Elizabeth hands the phone back with a careless gesture, her fingers barely touching the screen, her expression smoothing into practiced indifference as Ashley continues scrolling through other photos, oblivious to the calculations occurring across the table.

Internally, the moment is reclassified as disorder rather than defeat.

She needs to speak with her father. The institutional approach—the complaints, the bureaucratic pressure, the careful application of donor influence—has proven insufficient. Harold’s methods were exposed at that hearing, stripped bare by Michael’s attorney in a way that still makes her jaw tighten when she thinks about it. Perhaps the consultants can help with something more robust, something that operates outside the channels that have already been tried.

Elizabeth does not react, does not reach out, and does not escalate. Not here, not now, not with Ashley watching and the coffee shop full of witnesses who might remember her expression if asked about it later.

The image is stored as evidence that a correction will eventually be required.

The Quiet Reclassification

Alone in the stillness of her room, Elizabeth reopens the image on her phone. The glow of the screen casts pale light across her features as she studies the photograph with the detachment of a surgeon examining an X-ray. She does not permit herself the indulgence of emotion. Instead, she reduces the image to its constituent elements: posture, spacing, the angle of bodies, the implication of intimacy. She catalogs each detail with clinical precision, filing away data points that might prove useful later.

The real failure, she concludes after several minutes of analysis, is not rejection itself. Rejection can be managed, reframed, even weaponized under the right circumstances. No, the genuine failure is far more fundamental: the complete absence of consequence following defiance. Michael walked away from her, from her family, from everything the Ford name represents, and he suffered nothing for it. He flourished. He surrounded himself with new people, built new structures of support, and continued ascending while she remains here, studying photographs on her phone like some discarded thing.

That asymmetry is intolerable.

Elizabeth sets the phone face-down on her desk. Her fingers trace the wood grain as she begins constructing frameworks for correction. Punishment is too crude a word for what she envisions. This requires something more surgical, more lasting. Michael needs to understand that choices carry weight, that defiance invites response, that walking away from Elizabeth Ford is not something one simply does without paying a price commensurate with the insult.

Her mind turns first to the obvious tools at her disposal. The Waters family remains firmly within her father’s sphere of influence. Phil Waters has proven himself reliably pliable, though not through any genuine business partnership. Her father framed him for a critical safety failure at one of the Ford facilities, made it clear he would take the fall publicly if he refused to cooperate. Phil recognized the impossibility of fighting that kind of power and capitulated. That leverage keeps his daughters’ careers afloat and ensures his continued compliance. Perhaps the twins themselves could serve some purpose. Victoria and Rebecca shared Michael’s bed knew his routines and vulnerabilities, occupied space in his life that Elizabeth herself once claimed. They possess institutional knowledge that could prove valuable if properly directed.

She allows herself to explore this avenue for several minutes, mapping out potential approaches, points of leverage, ways the twins might be positioned to create disruption. Then, with the same clinical detachment she applies to the photograph, she discards the entire framework.

The Waters twins are compromised assets. Despite everything that transpired, despite the public humiliation of the Calvin Klein incident and their subsequent exile from Michael’s life, they still harbor feelings for him. Elizabeth observes this during her careful monitoring of their social media presence, the way they avoid any direct criticism of Michael even as they rebuild their careers in New York. They will not agree to hurt him. More importantly, they cannot get close enough to matter. Michael classified them as threats and adjusted his security accordingly. Any approach through the twins will be detected, traced, and ultimately reflected back upon the Ford family in ways that create more problems than solutions.

Elizabeth rises from her desk and moves to the window, looking out across the manicured grounds of the sorority house without really seeing them. The hedges are trimmed to geometric precision, the walkways swept clean, everything arranged to project permanence and control. She appreciates the order, the way the landscape communicates ownership without requiring explanation. This is how power should function: quietly, inevitably, without the need for dramatic confrontation.

Her thoughts drift to a pre-breakup conversation, when Michael trusted her enough to share pieces of himself. He mentioned Stephanie Merks one evening, his voice carrying an unusual weight of regret. The girl was his girlfriend, personal assistant, his study partner, someone who organized the chaos of his life during those early years at Michigan. But she was also someone he felt he failed.

Elizabeth recalls the specific language Michael used. He always felt guilty that he didn’t do more to protect Stephanie from her sister’s influence. The sister—Samantha, though everyone calls her Sammi—was described in terms that Elizabeth finds professionally interesting. A dominant force of nature, Michael said. Utterly ruthless and conniving. Willing to do whatever it takes to get her way.

The description struck Elizabeth at the time as unusually vivid for Michael, who typically speaks about people with measured neutrality or generally positive terms. There was something almost fearful in his assessment of Sammi, the way one might acknowledge a predator that recognizes no boundaries in pursuit of its prey. And beneath that wariness, Elizabeth detected something else: genuine concern for Stephanie, who apparently was unable to escape her younger sister’s gravitational pull.