Chapter 10: Emmett's Safe

Emmett's POV

I walked out of the boardroom and kept walking until I reached the loading dock.

It was the one place in the building that still smelled like Desmond Lowry.

Diesel, cardboard, cold concrete.

I stood at the edge of Bay Six with my hands in my pockets and thought about what I'd just done.

I had handed Gavin a clean win.

I had also given Tilda the one thing she needed, a vote nobody could say I'd pressured.

If I stayed on the board, every ballot she cast would read as mine.

I had decided that before I fell asleep in her bed, and I had not told her, because she would have argued.

She argued about everything, and I liked it.

That was the problem.

I leaned against the dock wall and let my head go back against the brick.

Ten years ago I had tried to warn her at her own wedding, and she had had me walked out.

I did not blame her for it.

My phone buzzed against my hip.

It was Tilda, asking where I was.

I read it twice and put the phone away without answering.

If I answered, I would go to her, and she would talk me out of the only clean thing I had left to give her.

Now she lay in my head, laughing in the dark, her wrist in my hand under the faucet.

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