Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
“Then if there’s no further discussion,” Raymond said, “I’ll call the—”
The doors opened.
Troy Barrymore walked in like he’d built the room, which, in a manner of speaking, his godfather had, and every head at the table turned to the one man none of them had thought to account for. They had all made the same mistake, the same one Raymond had been making since the day the photographs first changed hands. They had filed Troy under decoration. The golden boy in the pictures, the family friend, the pretty fixture at the edge of other people’s power. Nobody had ever once stopped to wonder what the boy who’d grown up in the Ericsson house actually knew, or held, or had spent the last three weeks quietly assembling while everyone watched the husband instead.
“Sorry I’m late,” Troy said pleasantly, and dropped a leather folder on the table in front of Greaves. “Don’t let me stop the vote. I only thought somebody ought to be here to cast the Ericsson shares.”
Raymond’s smile slipped its first inch. “Those shares have no voice in this room. Camilla isn’t—”
“Camilla’s indisposed.” Troy opened the folder with one finger. “So she signed her proxy over to me while she was lying in a hospital bed your little ball put her in. The whole family bloc. And as of nine o’clock this morning, so did her husband. Every share Trey Flint controls.” He nodded once at the second set of papers, crisp and notarized beneath the first. “You’ll find it all in order, Raymond. I had very good lawyers go over it twice, because I knew you’d want to be sure.”
The number hit the table like a dropped safe. The Ericsson family bloc plus every vote Flint owned, and it was not close, it had never once been close from the second Troy crossed the threshold, and every man at that table ran the arithmetic at the same instant and arrived in the same place, which was that Raymond Glasgow had just lost, in public, in the room he had chosen for his own coronation.
And then came the part Troy had been looking forward to all week.
The doors opened a second time. Two uniformed officers came through them, and behind the officers a heavyset man in a tired suit with a badge clipped to his belt, and the boardroom went very still.
“Raymond Glasgow?”
Raymond came to his feet so fast his chair went over behind him.
“You’re under arrest.” The detective said it almost kindly, the way Troy supposed a man learned to say it after enough times. “Bribery of board members. Conspiracy and fraud. And the deliberate, well-documented defamation of Camilla Flint, which her attorneys will be very glad to walk you through.” A small pause. “We’ll have a good deal more by morning. Men carrying gambling debts the size of yours tend to leave a trail a mile wide.”
Raymond said his own innocence. He said lawyer. He said a great many things as they walked him out past the long table of men who had been eating from his hand ninety seconds earlier and would now swear to anyone listening that they’d never trusted him, and Troy didn’t bother to listen to a word of it, because the boardroom had erupted into the particular roar of a dozen powerful people all working out at once which way the wind had been blowing the whole time.
He took out his phone.
He found the thread he wanted, the one he’d labeled, because he was a man who enjoyed his own jokes, Mr & Mrs Flint, and he typed with both thumbs while the detective read Raymond Glasgow his rights somewhere behind him.
Mission accomplished. You guys owe me.
He hit send, slid the phone back into his pocket, and went to go find out whether the two idiots he’d just saved had finally managed to figure it out for themselves.
Epilogue
One Year Later
Iwake the way I’ve woken most mornings this past year, which is slowly, and warm, and held.
There was a time, a whole long season of my life, when I woke alone down a hall behind the second door, in a room someone had very kindly made up for the stranger they’d married, and I would lie there in the grey enormous quiet of a penthouse that didn’t know my name and listen to the city forty-one floors below going about its business without me. I got very good at that kind of morning. I had practice. I have decided, this year, that I never want to be that good at anything ever again.
Because this morning there’s an arm across me, heavy and certain, and there’s the slow warmth of him at my back, and there’s his mouth at the curve of my shoulder, unhurried, careful in the particular way he’s been careful with me for months now, as though I’m something he has been told to handle gently and has decided, privately, to handle more gently still. He thinks I’m still half asleep. I let him think it. I lie there in the circle of my husband and let myself be loved the way the very rich and the very lucky get loved, slowly, with the whole morning ahead and nowhere either of us has to be, and I do not cry, though there was a year I’d have cried at less than this, and I think my heart, my poor scolded much-discussed heart, has never in its life beaten quite so well as it does in the safe slow keeping of his arms.