Fletcher called Friday morning at ten past nine.She was at her desk with the phase three brief open and her coffee going cold beside her keyboard when the phone lit up. She looked at the screen and smiled before she could stop herself. Fletcher Hartley. Sixty-two years old, warm handshake, the specific directness of a man who had spent four decades in rooms where people talked around things and had decided at some point to stop doing that himself.She had always liked Fletcher. She had liked him before she married his son and she had liked him through the marriage and she had liked him in the year since it ended and she picked up the phone.“Lunch,” he said. No preamble. No how are you first, no how is everything. Just lunch, direct and without ceremony, the way Fletcher did everything.She said yes. She had tried to say no to Fletcher twice in five years and both times she had ended up at whatever table he had in mind anyway. She did not try a third time.They met at the Italian pla
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