I pick up the badge. Clip it to my lapel.
"Verona," I say. "Is the restaurant any good?"
The receptionist's smile goes slightly warmer. "It's exceptional."
"Good." I pick up my bag. "Which way?"
"Right through there, Ms. Monroe." The receptionist gestures toward a set of double doors across the lobby. "First conference room on the right. Mr. Sullivan and the board are expecting you."
I nod and head that way.
I do the thing I always do before a first meeting — roll my neck once, shake out my hands, take one breath that's just for me before everything becomes professional. It's not a ritual exactly, more like a reset. A reminder that I've walked into harder rooms than this one and walked out having won.
I check my reflection in the glass of the lobby doors before I push them open. Hair up, makeup holding after four hours of travel, the scar visible across my eyebrow and cheek the way it always is. I stopped trying to fully cover it several years ago. It doesn't hide cleanly, and the effort of pretending otherwise started costing more than it was worth.
It's mine. I've made my peace.
Today’s armor is a black sleeveless turtleneck, a white pencil skirt, and black stilettos.
You've handled difficult before, I tell myself.
I push through the doors into a corridor and immediately hear them before I see anything. Raised voices carrying intermittently through the walls of the conference room, clear enough that I slow my pace without meaning to.
"—not a request, it's a directive—"
"—board's position has been clear since the incident and frankly since well before it—"
Then louder, cutting through both of them.
"I understand the board's position. I understood it when Jackson sent the memo, and I understood it when my attorney walked me through it at brunch. What I don't understand is why we're having this conversation again in my own conference room when the solution is already on her way up."
Then silence.
Wonderful.
Difficult client who doesn't want to be managed, a board that has decided he needs to be, and a room full of people who are going to take one look at me when that door opens and decide whether I'm a referee or a weapon before I've said a single word. This isn't a PR problem with a clean communications solution. This is a power struggle that's been running long enough to have its own momentum, and I'm walking into the middle of it.
I've been in this room before. Different city, different client, same architecture.
I know how to walk into it.
I roll my shoulders back. Force myself to breathe.
Here goes nothing.
CHAPTER SIX
BENNET
My morning is not off to a good start. I am running on the concept of sleep. Not actual sleep, the memory of it, the theoretical possibility of it. And a coffee so strong my assistant looked mildly concerned when she handed it to me.
My run-in with Jenn in the gym has replayed in my head approximately forty times and gotten worse with each iteration.You're of childbearing ageis going to haunt me into the next life.
I hadn't been at my desk a full hour before the board summoned me to the conference room, which is where I have been for the better part of three hours while Frank Delacroix and his rotating cast of concerned old men have catalogued every single public misstep I've made in the past five years with the thoroughness of a criminal indictment.
The fountain. The Vegas situation. The Cannes situation. The other Vegas situation, which was different from the first one and somehow worse. The numbers attached to each one — estimated reputational cost, projected impact on Meridian, liability exposure — stacking up on the whiteboard like a tab I keep running and never paying.
Rosalie is the only person in the room on my side, and even she winced at the Las Vegas number.
