Chapter 19: The Speech He Owed

Anthony's POV

I wrote the speech four times and burned the first three in the sink of my office.

It was nine at night, and the foundation floor was empty except for the cleaner's cart at the far end of the hall.

The fourth draft was one page.

Six years ago a woman I never met pulled me out of a lake, I had written. I spent six years thanking someone else.

I looked at that for a long time.

It was a plain sentence, and every word of it was a debt.

Ciara had said I could do what I liked on the twelfth, as long as I kept her out of my plan.

I had understood her, finally.

The plan had been mine from the start, and it had never once asked her what she wanted.

So I wrote the part that came next, and it took the rest of the page.

At the bottom I wrote a line I had not planned, and then I read it aloud to the empty room to see if I could say it.

"I resign as chairman of this foundation, effective at the end of this speech."

I could say it.

That surprised me more than anything had in a month.

The door opened without a knock.

A man in a charcoal suit stood in the frame with a leather folio under his arm.

He was my mother's second lawyer, the young one, who handled the things Edmund would not.

"Mr. Kensington. I'm sorry to come so late."

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