Chapter 10: Go Now

The Aldane Foundation boardroom was on the twelfth floor, with a table long enough to land a plane on.

Fourteen people sat around it.

Some of them I knew from six years of luncheons.

Some of them had laughed in the ballroom.

Constance sat at the head in a cream suit.

Preston sat at her right hand, gray in the face, with a glass of water he didn't touch.

When we walked in, nobody spoke.

Rafe pulled out a chair for me first, and then he stayed standing.

"Good afternoon," he said.

"Rafe Aldane," said Constance, in her soft public voice. "I'm told you are dead."

"I'm told that too."

A man at the end of the table coughed into his fist.

"You have been gone eight years," Constance said.

"You return the week before the gala, in the company of my son's wife."

"I think the board is entitled to ask what you have planned."

"I've planned to vote."

"With her."

"With nobody."

"She has been your accomplice for years. The affair, the staged death, the money."

I stood up.

I hadn't planned to.

"Which year?" I said.

Constance turned her pale blue eyes on me.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You said years. Which year did I start?"

"For nine years I was in the costume shop at the Gramercy Theatre," I said. "Rafe was upstate with a hammer."

"I never said you were in the same place."

"You said I helped him fake his death."

"Joanna, sit down."

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