Page 6 of His Wall

They both looked at me.

My chest tightened. I thought about the Meridian subaccount that didn't reconcile when I ran it against the older ledgers. The capital trail that ran past the wall we'd built when we forced Conrad out. I hadn't been able to walk away from it.

"Agreed." I lifted my chin and let the grin out. "Ghost doesn't exist. Shelve it. Let's talk Q4 — I've got thoughts on the Austin office, and they are, as always, brilliant."

Declan half-laughed. "Go."

I ran through Austin for ten minutes. Declan pushed on the headcount. Nolan pushed on the lease. I gave on the headcount, agreed to renegotiate the lease, made a joke about the landlord that Nolan did not acknowledge, and Declan laughed at it despite himself. By the time he closed his folder, my pulse was back where it was supposed to be.

Claire stood, gathered the folders into a clean stack, the pitcher in her free hand, and the glasses onto a small tray. Declan clapped my shoulder on his way out. Nolan nodded and followed.

I held the door.

Claire came through with the stack against her chest, the tray balanced on her forearm. Her shoulder passed an inch from mine. I caught the scent she wore, if she wore one — clean, faint, something I couldn't name.

"Nice catch on the printout."

"Of course, Mr. Cross."

She didn't slow down. She didn't look back. The low knot of her hair went past my shoulder and down the hallway.

I stood in the doorway a second longer than I needed to. Then I went back to my office and closed the door behind me.

The Halverson call started fifteen minutes late. to go over the financials before approving the acquisition. By the time I hung up, Claire had a sandwich on the corner of my desk and a fresh coffee next to it. She came in and was gone again.

I ate the sandwich at my desk while I read through Meridian. Lunch with Declan turned into a phone call instead — he was buried in the Halverson aftermath and rescheduled for Wednesday — so I worked through one and into two. The Klein team came in the afternoon. I walked them through the revised allocation. They left looking like people who had been told what to hear.

I sat down at my desk after. The block was still on the calendar. Open. Do not fill. I did not use it for nothing.

I unlocked the bottom drawer, pulled the folder out, and opened it next to the keyboard that was, I noticed, still two inches too close to the monitor. I had not moved it back. I was leaving it where it was on purpose, although I couldn't have said exactly what the purpose was.

I ran the Meridian subaccount against the older ledgers one more time. The numbers came close. They did not reconcile. Not enough to flag in any audit. Not too little to call a rounding error.

I closed the folder. Locked it back in the drawer.

By 7:00 p.m., the floor had gone quiet. The cleaning crew had started their loop on the far end of the hall. I pulled my jacket off the back of the chair and killed the desk lamp. The office went to half-dark, only the hallway light coming in through the glass.

Claire was still at her desk.

She had her head down, the low knot of her hair catching the light off her monitor, the laptop open, a printed spread of archived deal records fanned across her left elbow. She was on the board deck.

I stopped at the edge of her desk.

"Good night, Claire. Go home."

She looked up. Just her eyes.

"Good night, Mr. Cross."

I held her eyes for half a second. She held mine. Her pen did not move.

I turned and walked to the elevator.

The garage was half-empty when I came out of the stairs. My footsteps came back at me off the concrete, and the ceiling lights buzzed, low and uneven. The black SUV was where I'd left it that morning.

I leaned against my car and stared at the concrete ceiling. Across the garage, a car beeped once, twice, and pulled out of its space. The engine faded into the ramp.

The stairwell door banged open at the far end of the row. Declan came around the back of the SUV, his coat hooked over one arm, his phone pressed against his ear, his mouth a flat line. He held up one finger to me without breaking the call, then dropped the phone from his ear and slid it into his pocket.