บททั้งหมดของ The Replacement Wife : บทที่ 51 - บทที่ 60

CHAPTER 52: PATERNITYHe tells me on a Tuesday morning, before work, before the rest of the house is moving.I'm making coffee when he comes into the kitchen. He's already dressed, which means he's been up for a while, and he has the look of someone who made a decision in the night and has spent the dark hours living with it rather than fighting it. He closes the kitchen door behind him, which he only does when he wants the conversation to stay between us and not travel down the hallway to wherever Mrs. Chen is moving around in the early morning.He says: "I've arranged a paternity test. Private lab, no clinic, results in four days. I wanted you to know before I told anyone else. Before James, before the lawyers, before anyone."I put the coffee down.The thing about the grey eyes was always going to need answering. I knew that. I think he knew I knew that, and I think he did this partly because he wanted the answer and partly because he couldn't let me carry the questio

CHAPTER 54: SOKOLOV IN PERSONViktor Sokolov is smaller than I expected.Not short. Average height, with the kind of build that reads larger in photographs than it does in actual rooms. He's somewhere in his late fifties, silver-haired, with the unhurried movements of someone who stopped being in a hurry a long time ago because he no longer has to be. He wears a dark suit with no tie, which in a formal meeting setting is a choice rather than an oversight it says I set the register, not you. He arrives exactly on time, which in a man of his resources is also a choice. He shakes Dominic's hand first and then mine, and holds mine a half-second longer than is standard. Not inappropriate. Just noted.We're in the Laurent Industries boardroom. Sokolov requested neutral ground and this is what we offered a table we chose, in a building we control, which is not neutral at all but lets him believe it is. He brought one person: a woman in her forties with close-cut hair and a leat

CHAPTER 56: JAMES STEPS UPThe deposition notice comes at seven in the morning.It's a regulatory inquiry, one of three the company has been navigating since the restructuring, the kind that moves slowly until it doesn't, and this one has chosen today to stop moving slowly. Dominic reads the notice at the kitchen table and looks at me across his coffee and says two things: first, that he'll be tied up in law all day and possibly tomorrow, and second, that James is already at the office."I know," I say. I called James from the car last night after I hung up with Eleanor. He knows about the Sterling files. He knows what Sokolov is actually building toward. We have a meeting at eight.Dominic nods. He looks at me for a moment with the particular look that means he wishes he could stay, that he's aware of what he's leaving me to manage, and that he trusts me to manage it anyway. Then he goes.James is already in the conference room when I arrive. He has the Sokolov acquisitio

CHAPTER 58: VICTOR'S SECRETDominic reads the documents alone.I give them to him when he gets home from the deposition, still in his coat, and I leave him in the study and I go and sit with Felicity in the kitchen and we don't talk much. We drink tea and listen to the house. Helena is asleep. Mrs. Chen has gone to her room. Through the study door at the end of the hall there is silence, the particular silence of a room where someone is reading something they cannot unread.It takes him forty-five minutes to read through everything.Then he picks up his phone and calls Victor.I don't hear what he says. The study door is closed and Dominic's voice when he is being controlled about something goes very flat and very low and doesn't travel. I hear the call end. I hear him open the door. He comes to the kitchen doorway and looks at me and then at Felicity and he says: "He's coming."Victor arrives in twenty minutes, which means he either was nearby or left immediately, and the fact

CHAPTER 60: THE ANSWERI spent the twenty-four hours the way I said I would. Thinking.I do it at night mostly, after Helena is down, sitting at the kitchen table with the letter and my laptop and the specific silence of a house where everyone else is asleep. I build the analysis the way I build any analysis starting with the data I have, mapping what I can verify, identifying where the gaps are and what would fill them. But this time what I'm building is not a projection or a performance review. This time I'm building a case.I already know I'm not taking the job. I knew that before the twenty-four hours started the way you sometimes know an answer before you've worked through the question. What the time gives me is not the decision but the work that makes the decision worth making.Sokolov's shell companies. The acquisition structure. The SEC case that is currently under review for market manipulation in a different sector, a different company, a different country but