Chapter 9: The Photograph

"Monday week," Emmett said into my shoulder.

He was lying behind me with his arm across my ribs and the phone's light on the ceiling.

"I'm sorry?"

"You said nothing until Monday week." He kissed the back of my neck.

"I would like it on the record that you broke your own rule at nine o'clock last night."

"It was a bad rule."

"It was a very good rule. I was following it."

"You followed it for about four minutes."

"Three," he said dryly.

I laughed, for the first time since the green dress, and then I looked at the group chat again.

Thirty messages had become sixty.

The retired judge had written: Tilda, call me. The banker had written: Is Emmett with you?

The old man had written a single line: Your father would have punched him. Meaning Gavin, I assumed.

At the bottom was an email from the corporate secretary.

Emergency board session, nine a.m. today, to consider the conduct of Chief Operating Officer Emmett Prendergast.

"He's calling a vote on you," I said.

"I figured he would."

"Because of that picture."

"Because of your hand on my back, in public, three days after he told everyone you were mentally ill."

Emmett sat up.

"If I'm a man who takes advantage of a sick woman, nothing I say about the term sheet counts."

"I'm not sick."

"I know. He needs the board to forget that."

I threw off the sheets.

"Then we're going."

"Tilda, you don't have to."

"I hold forty percent of that company," I said. "I'll sit in the front row."

We reached the Lowry Freight building at five to nine.

I had last stood in its lobby the week of my father's funeral.

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