Chapter 18: March Fourteenth

Greta's POV

The board's emergency session on the twentieth of February lasted twelve minutes.

Nine men and a lawyer read paragraph four of a dead man's trust.

Not one of them could move a date written into it.

The judge had watched the clinic director run out of a bakery on video.

She put the guardianship hearing off until after the annual meeting.

That left the fourteenth of March.

I was thirty-seven weeks and one day pregnant.

I wore a navy maternity suit that Libby had hemmed in an ambulance bay.

The elevator at Stroud Capital rose forty floors with me and the old lawyer.

Otis had pressed his forehead to mine at the street door.

"I'll be in the lobby," he'd said. "I'm not leaving it."

The boardroom was glass on three sides, with the Midtown skyline behind it.

The nine directors sat along the long table, and Holden sat at the head of it with his hands folded.

Constance sat against the wall, in the chair for guests, in black.

Daphne stood behind Holden with the minutes book in her arms.

She looked at me and then at my stomach, and her face went carefully blank.

"Mrs. Stroud," said the director on Holden's right, the oldest man at the table.

"The chair recognizes you as a shareholder. We understand you have a statement."

"I have a vote."

The old lawyer put a folder on the table and opened it to a page with a gold seal.

"Mrs. Stroud holds fifty-two percent of the voting stock of this company, by bequest from her grandfather," he said.

"The annual proxy lapsed on the first of February, unsigned. Paragraph four, for any gentleman who hasn't read it."

"She votes in person."

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