Chapter 9: Furniture

I picked up his phone and held it out to him with the screen facing me.

"Does she know what?"

Weston took it from my hand and turned it face down on the bench.

"Business," he said.

"Your uncle texts you about business the minute we're done."

"It's about the deal."

"Does she know what, Weston?"

"I can't tell you yet."

I had heard that sentence once already, in the kitchen, and I had let it go.

I was not going to let it go twice.

"Then I'll tell you something I know," I said.

I slid off the bench and pulled my skirt down.

"Two years ago, I was in the corridor outside the forty-seventh-floor kitchen with a stack of files.

You were talking to Leland by the coffee machine."

His face changed.

"You said, 'Counsel is furniture, Uncle. You don't ask furniture what it wants.'"

The boathouse was very quiet.

I heard the sailboat creak on its rack above us.

"I said it," Weston said.

He did not look away, and he did not apologize.

"You said it about me. I was standing eight feet down the corridor."

"Delaney."

"And last spring, the general counsel seat.

"I had the best numbers in the department and the longest tenure. The board went with an outside hire, and the board only does what you tell it."

"I told them no on you," he said.

"You told them no."

"Yes."

I had expected a denial. The fast, practiced denial he gave the press.

Instead he stood there with his shirt hanging open and gave me the one answer I least wanted to hear.

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