All Chapters of Signed, Sealed, Sinful : Chapter 41 - Chapter 47

We drove back to Manhattan mostly in silence.Xander was on his phone for part of it, short calls, one to Franklin, one to Benjamin, all brief and clipped. I sat beside him and watched the lights of the bridge come up ahead of us and thought about Samuel sitting alone in his apartment tonight reading a two-sentence note from a woman he never got to meet.When we got back to the penthouse, which Xander used on late work nights and which I had a key to only because it was part of the public arrangement, he took off his jacket and set his phone on the kitchen counter face-down."Tell me about the photo," I said.He turned around."Benjamin found it in the email Casandra sent to the journalist," he said. "It was taken inside the Williams Group building. Private hallway, off the main floor." He looked at me steadily. "It's the night we kissed."I sat down at the kitchen counter."Someone had a camera," I said."A phone camera," he said. "Long-range lens app. Shot through the glass partitio

Mirabel set my coffee down at eight-fifteen and said: "Good morning. You look like you slept.""Four hours," I said."That's more than Xander," she said, and walked back toward her station.I opened my laptop and pulled up the statement Xander and I had released the night before. Three business outlets had covered it, two in neutral terms, one with a slightly skeptical headline but fair body text. The photo Casandra had taken had not been published.Not yet.I opened my design files for the hotel project and worked through two layout revisions until nine AM, when Franklin called."The counterclaim is filed," he said. "It argues that Albert's court motion is built on evidence obtained through a coordinated campaign of corporate espionage, citing Tonia's cooperation statement and Casandra's unauthorized server access.""How strong is it?" I said."Strong enough to matter," Franklin said. "Not strong enough to guarantee dismissal before the board session.""When is the board session?""T

The board room was on the thirty-second floor, all glass on one side and dark wood on the other, and it fit twenty people around a single long table.I counted them when we came in at nine fifty-five. Eighteen board members, three lawyers including Franklin, one court-appointed observer from the fraud inquiry, and Albert Crawford, who arrived at exactly ten o'clock with two associates and sat at the far end of the table like someone who had already decided how the morning would go.He looked at me once when he sat down.I looked back at him until he looked away.Xander opened the session at two minutes past ten. He kept his voice level and moved through the formal items without wasting time, and I sat to his right, next to Franklin, with my notebook open and my pen in my hand.Albert's lawyer stood first.His name was Gerard, and he was tall and well-dressed and moved through his argument like someone who had practiced it many times. He presented the fraud motion, quoted Tonia's state

I walked for forty minutes.The city at six in the evening was loud and bright and completely indifferent to everything happening inside me, which was exactly what I needed. I walked until my hands were cold, then put them in my pockets and kept going.The letter was in my coat pocket.I hadn't read it again since the hallway, but I could feel it there, folded along its creases, eight years old and finally delivered to the wrong person because the right person was gone.Richard had written it to my mother.He'd written her full name at the top: Ada Grace Emmanuel. He'd written it the way you write someone's name when you want them to know you're speaking directly to them and not to anyone else.He had listed what he knew, the inspection report, the date it was signed, the repairs that were scheduled and never completed, the decision he had made to defer the work until the next quarter because the budget was tight. He had written: "I made a business decision on a day that should have b