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)
“I’ll come straight to the point,” he says, and lays a slim leather folder on the desk between us. “I’ve always admired that about you, Flint. No taste for ceremony. So.” He flips the cover open with one manicured finger. “Neither will I.”
I don’t reach for the photographs. I’ve negotiated against far better men than Raymond Glasgow, and the first thing they teach you, if anyone bothers teaching you anything at all where I come from, is that the man who lunges for the thing on the table has just told the whole room how badly he wants it. So I leave the folder where it lies, the edge of one glossy print showing past the leather, and I look at Raymond instead, and I let the silence do to him what silence does to a man who walked in with his lines rehearsed.
He cracks before I do. They always crack before I do. He turns the top photograph a few degrees toward me with that same finger. “Two months,” he says. “And I’ll be candid, that’s only what we gathered in the last two months.”
I look down.
It’s her. Camilla, in the soft grey wool coat I bought her in the spring because she said the cold here was different from California cold, her face turned up toward a man a full head taller than she is, laughing at something he’s just said. Barrymore. There’s no mistaking him, there has never been any mistaking him, the most photographed jaw in the sport, the golden retired god of the Waymakers, and his hand is resting at the small of my wife’s back as though it has every right in the world to be there.
I turn it over. The next one. The two of them on a park bench, her head tipped to rest against his shoulder, two paper cups of coffee between them on the slats. The next. A café table behind glass, his coat draped over the back of her chair. The next, and the next.
I go through all of them. I make myself do it slowly, one print at a time, my face arranged into the same expensive nothing I’d wear across any table where nine figures were changing hands, because the alternative is to let Raymond Glasgow see what is happening underneath it, and I would sooner take a letter opener to my own hand than give him that.
“You understand,” Raymond says gently, “why I’m showing you these.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Because I want you out.” He says it pleasantly, almost warmly, the way only the truly old money can say the very ugliest things. “And I’m hardly alone, Flint. The whole board wants you out. We’ve only been waiting for a reason that would let us be civil about the doing of it.”
“Civil,” I repeat.
“We’re old-fashioned here. You knew that walking in. We prefer our own kind, and Barrymore is our own kind, down to the bone. Good family, good name, the right schools, a grandfather with a wing of the hospital named after him.” He spreads both manicured hands, taking in the room, the building, the whole gilded world I bought my way into. “Camilla is Richard’s daughter. Every man at that table watched her learn to walk in these halls. We are all, each one of us, cut from a single bolt of cloth.” His gaze travels down my suit, which is worth rather more than his car, and finds it wanting anyway, the way it was always going to find it wanting no matter what I paid. “And then there is you. The boy from the wrong side of the tracks who married his way to a seat at the table. It was never going to hold. Surely you always knew that.”
I say nothing. I’ve learned over the years that nothing is the most expensive thing I can hand a man like this, because nothing gives him no purchase, no edge, nothing to set his weight against.
“Give up your seat,” Raymond goes on, encouraged by the quiet the way I knew he would be. “Sell your shares back to the group. We’ll see you paid handsomely, more than handsomely, and you can carry that remarkable talent of yours somewhere it’ll be admired for what it earns instead of resented for what it bought.” He settles back into the leather, crossing one leg over the other. “Or stay. Stay, and explain to a table full of men who watched that girl grow up why you mean to go on sitting among them while your wife makes a public fool of you with the franchise’s favorite son. Do you really want to remain, Flint? Tethered to a woman who’s been meeting the Waymakers’ greatest legend behind your back for months?”
There it is. The blade he came to slide in, finally drawn out from under all that civility and pushed home clean.