Rhodes received this with characteristic reserve, but I was sitting close enough to feel the shift in him. The almost invisible easing of something that had been held very tightly.
Miranda smiled, which gave me chills.Cue the flinching!I didn’t know what she had up her sleeve, but her smile told me she was largely unbothered by Terry’s support.
But Rhodes ignored her. Under the table, his hand found mine. He didn’t look at me. He was still focused on the board, still composed, the perfect image of measured confidence. But his fingers closed around mine, briefly, and I felt the pressure of it all the way up my arm.
We’re doing it,that grip said.It’s working.
I squeezed back, because that was my job, because the board was watching, because this was the very job I’d been hired to do.
Because it was true. It was working.
Which was exactly what terrified me.
The meeting wrappedup after another two hours, all handshakes and pleasantries, and the faint collective relief of people who’d reached an important agreement. I tried to be appropriate. I smiled at Abigail Furst, who told me the wedding ceremony was going to be lovely and she couldn’t wait for it. I laughed at something Gerald said that I didn’t quite catch. I stood beside Rhodes and let the warmth of the room settle around us.
Outside the windows, the mountains gleamed. On the surface, everything was peaceful, but my inner car alarm was still going off.
Mom called Grammy. Miranda is investigating.
Rhodes touched the small of my back as we moved toward the door, the light pressure of his hand steering us out together, and I felt it like a question I didn’t know how to answer.
We were so close.
Another hurdle had been cleared, which would bring us to the wedding. And then Luke would be safe, the farm would be saved, the board would adjourn, and I could stop nonstop performing and start…
What, exactly?
You’re going to blow this,said the voice in my head.Your mother is a live grenade, and Miranda is holding the pin. You’ve been sitting on the information for twenty-four hours because you’re a coward who doesn’t want to see his face when he realizes you already knew this was all going to blow up.
I smiled at Haruki as he passed us in the doorway.
“Good meeting,” Rhodes said quietly, close to my ear.
“Yes,” I agreed.
Down the hall, Miranda turned the corner and disappeared without looking back. I watched the space where she’d been and felt the clock, which had always been running hot, pick up its impossible pace.
BUZZ
RHODES
The board meetinghad gone exactly as planned.
I stood in the hallway outside the boardroom and permitted myself approximately forty-five seconds of something that might, in another man, have been called relief. Terry’s vote of confidence. The Singapore deal. Cousin Andrew’s coffee cup salute. Rory’s hand in mine under the table, steady and warm, grounding me in exactly the way I had not planned for and could not now seem to do without.
Forty-five seconds. Then I put it away.
Although I was so close I could taste it, I hadn’t won yet.
Rory was beside me as we moved down the hall, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her. She’d been perfect in there. Composed, warm—and when Abigail asked her how we met, she’d produced a party in Manhattan, andI never go to parties so I knew it had to be fatewith such easy conviction that even I almost believed it. I had known she would be useful. I had not anticipated that she would be remarkable. I glanced at her, my heart full.
Then I remembered that I needed to tell her about her mother. And the fact that her mother had thrown a chair at the process server. And that myprivate investigatorhad been there—and she’d threatened to throw a chair at him, too—but then he’d offered her money to settle out of court, and she’d accepted said money, but then she’d disappeared.
My forty-five-second high was just that: short-lived.
My phone buzzed with a notification:
GATE - NORTH ENTRANCE
