Chapter 2: They need 'stability'

Liam Wade had learned a long time ago that boardrooms were just dinner tables with worse lighting.

Everyone smiling. Everyone lying.

"The Q3 numbers speak for themselves," he said, sliding the folder closed. "International division is up eighteen percent. I don't think anyone in this room wants to argue with eighteen percent."

Nobody did. Not out loud.

Edward Marshall sat at the head of the table anyway, because he always sat at the head of the table, regardless of whose numbers were on it.

"No one's arguing, Liam." Edward's voice was warm. Edward's voice was always warm right before it wasn't. "We're proud of what you've built. Ryan would have been proud."

Liam's jaw tightened at his late brother's name, dropped so casually into a sentence about market share.

"Don't," he said quietly.

"Don't what?"

"Use him to soften whatever you're about to say next."

A small silence. Claire, two seats down, examined her nails like the conversation bored her. It didn't. Claire was never bored when Liam was being cornered — she just preferred to watch it happen rather than throw the first punch.

Edward folded his hands. "There's a proposal, at the January shareholder meeting, to formalize succession planning."

"Succession." Liam repeated the word flatly. "I'm thirty-four, Edward."

"And unmarried. No children. No — stability, shall we say — beyond the office." Edward spread his hands like he was being reasonable. "The board likes predictability. A man with no ties is a man who can walk away at any time. That makes people nervous."

"The board likes returns," Liam said. "I've given them returns for eleven years."

"You've given them returns," Edward agreed. "Ryan was born into this family. There's a difference, in some rooms, that outlasts spreadsheets."

There it was. The quiet reminder, wrapped in silk: you're not really one of us.

Liam had heard it in a dozen forms since he was nine years old, since a stranger named Edward Marshall had signed papers that turned an orphaned boy with dead parents into a Marshall in name only. He'd spent twenty-five years making that name mean something on a balance sheet.

It had never once made it mean something at this table.

"So what's the actual proposal," Liam said. "Say it plainly. I don't have patience for the warm-up today."

Edward's smile thinned. He nodded to Claire.

Claire looked up from her nails like she'd been waiting for her cue — she probably had.

"There's talk," she said, "of restructuring the board's confidence vote to include a leadership review. Given your... personal circumstances."

"My personal circumstances."

"You live alone. You work eighty-hour weeks. You haven't brought a date to a company function in three years." Claire shrugged, delicate and precise, like she was listing facts rather than building a case. "It reads as instability to outside investors. Fair or not."

Liam looked between them — the old man's calm patience, Claire's practiced innocence — and felt the shape of it settle into place. This wasn't concern. This was construction. They were building a narrative, brick by brick, and the bricks were things about his life that had nothing to do with the company he'd tripled in value.

"And if I brought a date to a function," Liam said slowly, "this concern would evaporate."

"It would certainly help optics," Edward said. "The board responds to stability. A partner. Roots. It doesn't have to be permanent."

It doesn't have to be permanent. As if Liam hadn't already understood exactly what kind of theater they wanted him to perform.

"You want a prop," Liam said.

"We want," Edward said, "for this family, and this company, to weather the review cleanly. That's all."

Liam stood. The meeting was over, whether or not anyone else agreed.

"I'll take it under advisement," he said, which was corporate for I heard you, and I don't trust a word of it.

Eva was waiting outside the boardroom, tablet in hand, the way she always was — like she'd timed her presence to the exact second he'd need an exit.

"That bad?" she asked, falling into step beside him.

"They want a leadership review," Liam said. "Dressed up as concern for my well-being."

Eva's eyebrows rose. "Convenient timing. Right before the January vote."

"Edward doesn't believe in coincidence. Neither do I."

"So what do they actually want?"

Liam exhaled through his nose, already hating the answer before he said it.

"A relationship," he said. "Something the board can point to. Roots, Edward called it."

Eva stopped walking. "You're joking."

"I wish."

"Liam. You haven't dated anyone seriously since—" She caught herself, wisely, and rerouted. "You haven't dated anyone seriously in years, and now they want you to produce a girlfriend on demand, like a quarterly report."

"That's the pitch, yes."

"And you're actually considering it?"

Liam didn't answer right away. He thought about Edward's warm, poisonous voice. About Claire's careful little list of his "instabilities." About the twenty-five years of proving himself to people who had already decided, the day Edward brought him home, that he would always be the outsider wearing their name.

If they wanted a performance, he could give them one on his terms, not theirs.

"I'm considering something," he said. "I don't know what yet. But I'm done letting them write the whole script."

Eva studied him for a long moment, the way she did when she was deciding whether to push.

"Whatever it is," she said finally, "just remember — Claire doesn't lose. She redirects. If you hand her a new variable, she'll find a way to use it against you too."

Liam almost smiled. Almost.

"Then I'll have to find a variable she can't touch."

He didn't know yet how right, or how wrong, that plan would turn out to be.

Back in his office, Liam stood at the window for a long time, looking out over the skyline his company's logo now sat on top of.

Eleven years. Eleven years of eighty-hour weeks, of building something real out of the resources Edward had handed him — resources that had come, if he was honest with himself, from somewhere he still didn't fully understand.

He'd been nine when Edward Marshall found him. Nine, and freshly orphaned, his parents gone on some research assignment overseas that no one in the family ever discussed in detail. He remembered fragments.

A woman's voice reading him to sleep. A man's laugh. Then nothing, and then Edward, and then a new name that never quite fit right, and a quiet, watchful older boy named Ryan who never fully warmed to the stranger sharing his father's attention.

He'd never asked too many questions. Edward had been kind, in his distant, transactional way, and asking questions had always felt like biting the hand that fed him.

Ryan was gone now too — a car accident, three years back, the kind of loss the family discussed only in careful, clipped sentences — and whatever fragile goodwill had existed between them had gone with him, unresolved.

What was left was Edward's warm, calculating patience, and Claire's quiet redirections, and a board that wanted him to produce a girlfriend like a line item.

Liam pulled out his phone and stared at it for a moment, thinking of no one in particular. He didn't have anyone to call. That was, apparently, the whole problem.

He set the phone down and turned back to the window.

Whatever solution he found, it would have to be someone with nothing to lose in this family's orbit. Someone Edward and Claire couldn't easily map, predict, or buy off.

He just didn't know yet that the answer to that problem was already circling closer than he thought — with a plan of her own, and a grudge sharp enough to match his.