And there it is, the question, the only one, and the cold man, the careful man, the man who has never once said a thing he couldn’t take back, looks at his weeping wife across a desk full of the proof of his own stupidity and does not hedge and does not calculate and does not protect himself even slightly.
“Because I love?—”
I don’t get to finish it.
She is already around the desk, already against me, the signed papers scattering off the edge and sailing white and meaningless to the floor where they belong, and her arms are around my neck and her wet face is against my throat and she’s saying it into my skin, over and over, the thing I have been dying for two months without knowing it was the thing I was dying for.
“I love you, Trey. I love you so much.”
I get my hands on her face. They’re shaking. I, who do not shake, hold my wife’s face in two shaking hands and tip it up to mine, and I tell her the truest sentence I own now, the one that’s replaced the eleven words I built my life on, the one that’s only three.
“I love you, Camilla.”
She can’t answer me.
I’m already kissing her.
?
Three floors below, at that same hour, in the glass-walled boardroom where Richard Ericsson had once run his whole world, Raymond Glasgow was perhaps ninety seconds from taking it.
He had the votes. He had counted them twice and bought half of them outright, and the best part, the part he’d been savoring all morning, was the empty chair at the head of the table. Flint hadn’t even come. The cheap stranger hadn’t shown up to defend his own throne, and Raymond fully intended to read that absence into the record as the surrender of a man who knew he was finished.
“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 lyingin 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 saidlawyer.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 nevertrusted 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
