All Chapters of Pregnant and Rejected, Now She’s Back!: Chapter 201 - Chapter 210

"I want to raise something," Powell said. Anton looked up. His counsel had been sitting across the desk for twenty minutes going through the client outreach language line by line, and had now put the pages down, which he did perhaps twice a year. "Raise it." "You're on three fronts." Powell took his glasses off. "Meridian's approaches, the partner outreach on the Park expansion, and the woman. Any one of those is defensible on its own. Together they describe a pattern, and patterns are what people find." "Nothing I've done is actionable." "Nothing you've done is actionable yet," Powell corrected. "You rang Whitlock personally. You've never done that. Eleven years I've worked for you and you have never once put your own voice on the wire for something like this, you've always had a reason not to be the person who made the call." Anton said nothing. "So I'd like to understand why this time," Powell said. "Efficiency." "Anton. . ." "You're paid to review language, Simon, not mot

"Six to nine months," Adrian said. Seth had been expecting a number. He had not been expecting that one. The conference room was Adrian's, on the 31st floor, and Lena was in the chair beside him with a legal pad she had not yet written anything on. Across the table Adrian had spread the Meridian filings out in a fan, which was a habit of his, and which Seth had always found faintly theatrical until this morning, when he understood the man was doing it so they could see how many layers there were. "Six to nine to get to discovery," Adrian said. "Then whatever he files to slow discovery, and he will, because his counsel is Simon Powell and Powell has done this eleven times that I know of." He tapped the fan of paper. "Realistically you are looking at a determination in eighteen months to two years." "The firm doesn't have 2 years," Seth said. "No." "It might not have two quarters." "No," Adrian agreed. "It might not., but if Whitlock will say under oath that he received a call, we

Powell rang at twenty minutes past nine, which he never did. Anton was in his study with the day's last papers and a drink he had poured and not touched, and he saw the name and felt something in his stomach reorder itself before he had picked up. "Simon." "I'm going to ask you a question," Powell said, "and I want you to think about your answer, because I'm asking it as your lawyer and not as your friend." "Ask it." "Have you been involved, in any advisory capacity, with a company called Meridian Advisory?" Anton looked at the surface of his drink. "No," he said. The silence on the line went on a beat too long. "All right," Powell said. "You don't believe me." "I said all right." Paper moved somewhere on Powell's end. "Here's why I'm asking. A registry contact of mine took a query about Meridian nine days ago. Beneficial ownership, through the trust. He didn't answer it, because he doesn't answer those, but he mentioned it to me because my name's adjacent to that structure

Seth told Brynn all of it on the phone on Thursday, and at the end of it she was quiet for so long he checked the screen to see if the call had dropped. "Say something," he said. "I'm thinking." Something moved in the background, a chair, a door closing. "this is alot, and Adrian's told you both to stay away from her." "Basically." Brynn said, "I'll go." Seth sat up. "No," he said. "You haven't thought about it." "I don't need to think about it. Brynn, you are the one person in this whose name is nowhere near any of it, and that's the only reason you're safe," "Seth." "Powell would have your entire history inside a week." His voice had risen and he brought it down. "Cassia. The custody file. All of it, in an exhibit, with your children's names in it, to make you look like a woman with a grievance who'd say anything for me. I'm not doing that to you. Not for this." "Are you finished?" "Brynn—" "Are you finished." she repeated. He stopped. "Right," Brynn said. "Now listen,

The card sat in the apron pocket for two days. Dahlia took the apron off each night and hung it on the hook by the walk in, and each morning she put it back on, and the card stayed where it was, and she did not once take it out and look at it, and she thought about it probably four hundred times. On Sunday, Marco found her standing in the dry store doing nothing. "Chef?" "Counting," Dahlia said. "There's nothing in your hand." "Go away, Marco." He went, in the manner of a man who intended to mention it to somebody, and Dahlia stood among the tins and got the card out and turned it over. Just a mobile number. She took a deep breath and dialed. "This is Brynn." "It's Dahlia Reyes." There was a pause of about a second and a half, and then, "Thank you for calling." "Don't thank me. I've not decided anything." Dahlia's free hand had made a fist in her apron pocket. "I want to ask you something and I want a straight answer, and if I get a managed one I'm hanging up and throwing t