CHAPTER THREE

Simon — The Ultimatum

His father called at seven in the morning, which meant it was important.

Elder Brown did not call at seven in the morning for any other reason. He called at nine for business. He called at noon for family matters that were dressed up as business. He called at seven when he had made a decision and wanted to deliver it before Simon had fully assembled his defenses for the day.

Simon was already at his desk. He was always already at his desk.

"I want you to listen before you respond," his father said. Not a greeting. A preamble.

"Good morning," Simon said.

A brief, dismissive sound. "The board meeting is in six weeks. You know what Hartwell has been doing."

Simon knew. Gregory Hartwell had been quietly acquiring minority stakes in Brown-affiliated companies for eleven months, positioning himself for a challenge to the board's structure. It was patient, intelligent work, the kind Simon might have respected under different circumstances. "I'm aware of Hartwell."

"Then you know that the family optics matter right now. Stability. Continuity." His father paused. "You are thirty-two years old, Simon. You have no wife. No engagement. You have nothing that reads as permanence to the men who are deciding whether this family's name still means something."

Simon was quiet. He had a particular relationship with silence — he had learned it as a child in this same house, in rooms where his father's pronouncements arrived like weather, and the only useful response was to let them pass before speaking.

"I'm not getting married to manage board optics," he said.

"You are going to do exactly that," his father said, with the calm certainty of a man who had been right about business for forty years and had stopped distinguishing between business and everything else. "Before the board meeting. Six weeks. I don't care about a ceremony. I care about a name on a document and a woman at your side who isn't a liability."

"This is not the nineteenth century."

"This is the Brown Corporation and Hartwell is not playing by any century's rules." His father's voice shifted slightly, the way it did when he was done with the performance of the conversation and moving to its substance. "I have adjusted my will, Simon. If you are unmarried at the time of the board meeting, your holding structure changes. You will retain your salary and your operational role. You will not retain majority."

The line was quiet.

Simon looked at the window. The Los Angeles morning was doing what it always did — burning off its marine layer with slow, indifferent confidence, revealing a sky that had no interest in his problems.

"You've thought about this for a while," he said.

"Since your brother's birthday dinner," his father said. "When you came alone for the fourth consecutive year and spent the evening on your phone."

"I came alone because I was—"

"Alone," his father said simply. "Six weeks, Simon."

The call ended.

Simon set the phone down on his desk and looked at it for a moment the way he looked at contracts that contained unfavorable clauses — not with panic, but with the specific, focused attention of a man calculating the cost of his options.

He had none that were good.

He was not seeing anyone. He had not been seeing anyone in any meaningful sense for two years. There were women — there had always been women, available and interested and largely uncomplicated — but he had not wanted complication and they had sensed it and arrangements had remained arrangements. None of them were candidates for what his father was describing.

He could refuse. He had refused his father before, on matters of business, and it had cost him and he had absorbed the cost and continued. But the board situation was not theoretical. Hartwell was real. The stakes were real. And his father, for all his archaic methodology, was not wrong about the optics.

He sat with it until nine, when Frederick appeared in his doorway, already talking.

"Dad called me too," Frederick said, dropping into the chair across from Simon's desk without being invited. "I think it's hilarious, personally."

"I'm sure you do."

"Come on. Simon Brown, marrying for the board." Frederick grinned. The grin was the same as always — wide, easy, the grin of a man who found the world's difficulties entertaining because they had never quite managed to become his own. "So who's the lucky woman?"

"There is no woman."

"There will be." Frederick reached across the desk and picked up Simon's pen, turned it in his fingers. "You'll find one. You always find solutions. It's your best and most exhausting quality."

Simon looked at him. Frederick, who was loud and careless and frequently reckless, who had cost the company more in managed complications than any single business failure, who was his brother and who he loved with the specific, exhausted love of a person who has long since stopped expecting someone to change and has accepted them in their wholeness instead.

"Put the pen down," Simon said.

Frederick put the pen down, still grinning.

Later, alone again, Simon turned the problem over in his mind the way he turned all problems — systematically, without sentiment, following each option to its logical end. He needed a woman who was discreet, who asked no questions, who would sign what was needed and disappear from his life cleanly when the time was done. Not a socialite, who would talk. Not a business acquaintance, who would leverage it. Not anyone with connections to his world.

Someone contained. Someone who had no particular reason to complicate things.

He thought about the new staff member in the east wing. He had not seen her yet, only noted her on the roster that Gloria had updated. But Gloria had mentioned her — quietly efficient, keeps to herself, no drama in her first week — and Simon had filed it the way he filed everything, without knowing yet what use he would make of it.

He looked at the window again.

Six weeks.

He picked up the pen Frede rick had put down and went back to work.