Chapter 16

ISABELLA

I was already gathering the papers in front of me. I stacked them without rushing. I straightened the edges. I set them to one side.

I looked across the desk at her.

"And who do you think you are to be informed?" I said.

I kept my voice the same way I kept the room — arranged exactly as I intended it, not one thing out of place.

"Perhaps," I said, "you need to be informed that this meeting you were so eager to schedule is, in fact, connected to the matter of your removal from the board."

She went very still.

"What?" she said.

I stood. I smoothed the front of my jacket once. I picked up the folder from the desk.

I looked at her.

"Watch me," I said.

Then I walked out.

Past Chloe. Down the corridor. Toward the boardroom at the end of the hall. I did not look back. I did not need to.

I already knew exactly what her face looked like.

* * *

The boardroom was full when I walked in.

Twelve people around a table that had held a hundred decisions over the years, not all of them good. I went to the head of the table and sat down and opened the folder and looked around the room once — at each face, the way you look when you want everyone to know you have already done the counting.

Mara came in two minutes after me. She sat near the middle. Her coat was still on. She had put her face back together in the corridor.

I did not look at her.

I looked at the table.

"You all have the documentation," I said. "The motion concerns the removal of Mara from her position on the board, effective at the close of this quarter, on the grounds of conduct incompatible with the welfare responsibilities attached to her role." I paused. "I am not going to read it aloud. You have had it for seventy-two hours. The question before us is simple. In favour, or not."

The man three seats to my left spoke first. Eleven years on the board. Careful with everything, including his words.

"In favour," he said.

The woman across from him nodded. "In favour."

Two more followed quickly.

Then the room stopped.

Because at the far end of the table, there was a man who had not yet moved. Who had been looking at the surface in front of him since I sat down, with the expression of someone doing arithmetic in a language they once knew fluently and now had to think about.

I had known he would be there.

I had arranged for him to be there.

Rane.

He looked older. Not broken — I want to be precise about that, because I have thought about it enough to know the difference. Just worn in the specific way that certain years wear on a person. His jacket was good. His hands on the table in front of him were very still.

The room waited.

I did not rush the wait. I had planned for this moment the same way I had planned for the nameplate and the office and the exact placement of the chair across from my desk. Some things only work if you do not reach for them.

When I turned to look at him, I did not say his name. I just looked at him across the length of the table, and I held it, and I waited.

He looked at me.

For a long moment, something moved between us that I could not name and did not try to. There are things that six years do to the space between two people that do not reduce to language. I had made my peace with that. Mostly.

Then Rane shook his head.

"No," he said. Quietly. Without apology. "Not today."

The room shifted.

I felt Mara's shoulders drop from across the table without looking at her. I heard the small breath that the room took collectively, the kind that means the balance has moved.

I looked at Rane for two more seconds.

I recorded his answer. I let him see me record it. Then I looked away.

Because I already knew the articles. I had read them more carefully than anyone in this room understood. Without Rane, the motion would not pass. His position carried weight that simple majority did not override. It was one of the original structures. One of the things that had survived everything else being dismantled.

I had known this going in.

I had walked in anyway.

I closed the folder.

I looked at the room.

Then I said, very clearly: "Fine. You are all dismissed."

I stood up.

I picked up the folder.

I walked out.

* * *

I stood at the window of the office for a long time after.

The city outside went on the way it always did. Enormous and indifferent and entirely unconcerned with what had just happened in a room on the executive floor.

I held the folder against my chest.

I had not won today. I knew that. I was not in the business of pretending otherwise to myself. Pretending things to yourself is how you stop being able to see clearly, and I needed to see clearly more than I needed to feel like I had won.

But I had done something today that mattered more than winning.

I had made Rane choose in a room full of witnesses.

I had made him say no out loud, with his name attached to it, in front of eleven other people who would remember it. And when he said it, he had looked at me. Not at Mara. Not at the table. At me.

I thought about that.

I thought about what it meant that he looked at me when he refused me.

Not through me. Not past me. At me.

Like I was still someone whose face contained information he needed.

I set the folder on the desk.

I pressed both hands flat against the surface and looked at the city.

There were four days until my first official visit with Lily. Four days in which Mara would be working. Preparing. Quietly and carefully doing the things she did with the confidence of someone who had never yet been stopped.

I thought about a little girl sitting in a dining room somewhere across the city. Eating without her rabbit. Sitting straight without being asked. Letting out a breath when footsteps walked away.

My jaw was tight.

I straightened.

I picked up my phone and called Chloe.

"Clear my afternoon," I said when she picked up.

"Done," she said. No questions.

"And get me everything Agnes filed. The original reports. All of them. I want to read them myself tonight."

A pause. "I'll have them within the hour."

"Thank you," I said.

I hung up.

I looked at the nameplate on the wall of the office and the name was still Rane's.

It was supposed to be my name.