Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 51 - Chapitre 60

Isla POVPriya's safe turned out to be older than I was, a squat green thing bolted to the floor of her back office behind a rack of tax binders, and on Wednesday afternoon she knelt in front of it with her glasses sliding down her nose and spun the dial without letting me see her hands. Three folders went in. The petition for divorce, signed in two places, mine in blue ink. The emergency motion to freeze every transfer of company interest. The objection to the buyout, so the thirty days could never start running. Each folder was tabbed in a different color, because Priya said that on a bad night nobody reads, they only see colors."The clerk's system stamps to the second," she said, spinning the dial back to nothing. "On the twenty-third I'll be in a rented car in the venue's parking lot with a laptop, a hotspot, and a thermos of the worst coffee in the state. By the time you walk onto that stage I'll have the first filing loaded, and the moment you've said what y

Isla POVRenata chose the bedroom because of the window. She crossed the room without asking where anything was, set her rolling case on the bench at the foot of the bed, and turned a chair from my dressing table to face the light, and I stood in the doorway watching a woman I once dismissed as furniture rearrange my furniture."Natural light, always," she said. "Lamps lie. Sit, please."I sat. She draped a towel over my shoulders, snapped the case open, and laid her brushes out on a clean cloth in order of size with the quiet efficiency of a surgeon, and I kept my back very straight against the chair, as if the wood might tip me out if I let my spine go."You don't wear enough foundation," she said, tilting my chin toward the window with two fingers. "You have good skin and you hide it.""I never had the patience.""Most people don't." She began working a pale cream along my jaw with a small sponge, and for a while neither of us

Isla POVFor a moment there was nothing in the alcove except the potted palm and the muffled roar of the ballroom, and it struck me that this was the one question I rehearsed least, because it was the one I assumed he would be too polite to ask. I reached up and tugged his bow tie a quarter inch to the left, though it didn't need it, the way I had at every black-tie dinner of our first six years, back when it was my job."The only thing you should know is that your mother is going to cry through the entire ceremony and Mabel's hamster is wearing a bow. Beyond that you're ahead of me. I never know what's going on with the board.""I didn't mean the board.""Then I don't know what you meant." I smiled up at him and let a little of my real tiredness show, which wasn't hard to find. "You've been wound tight for a month, Julian. You flinched in the car when I touched your sleeve.""I didn't flinch.""You did, a little."He le

Isla POVI took the pen. It was heavier than it looked, a black lacquered thing with a gold clip, and it sat in my hand for about as long as a person could hold her breath before she had to decide something. Dorian had braced the proxy form against his forearm so I could read it, my name printed in bold above a line I hadn't touched yet, and I read the two sentences nearest the signature the way I read every page Priya had ever handed me. ‘Agent for the whole of the Principal's interest. Until midnight.’ It was the shortest document I signed in ten years and the only one I understood completely."If it comes to a vote you don't want," Dorian said, "you can overrule me at midnight, with me standing in the room.""That's the part I believe least.""I know. Sign it anyway."I signed, with the two loops in the ‘S’ and the small hook on the ‘I’ that nobody else in the world could quite get right, and thought of fifty attempts in a folder on Ha

Isla POVI stopped looking at the index card somewhere around the third sentence, and I kept going without it, since the words had been in my mouth for a month."Ten years ago I mortgaged my parents' house so two people could rent a room that smelled of paint. I drew the first buildings at a kitchen table and brought in the first clients, and when our daughter was born I signed my share of the company over to my husband, because he asked me to and because I trusted him." I kept my eyes on a spot above the tables where nobody was sitting. "Last month I found out I don't own any of it anymore."The murmur that came back was low and puzzled, the sound of a room deciding whether this was a bit. Somebody near the bar laughed uncertainly and stopped."I'd like you to look under your chairs, please. The front two rows, and the press table."For a moment nobody moved. Then a woman in the front row, one of the directors, bent sideways in her gold-