My Husband Sent the Helicopter to Save a Dog, So I Signed novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Board

I played Constance the bakery recording in the corridor outside the boardroom.

She listened with her glasses in her hand, and when it ended she looked at the ceiling for a while.

"California is a two-party state, dear," she said. "She didn't agree to be taped. If you play that in this room, a lawyer will have it thrown out and call you a criminal."

"So it's worthless."

"It's yours. It tells you what's true. Keep it in your pocket." She put her glasses back on. "We'll get her to say it again with her own mouth, and we'll do it where she can't take it back."

The boardroom was glass on three sides, with a table long enough for fourteen.

Nine directors sat along it, in dark suits, with water glasses.

Odette sat at the head with her folder and her braid, and she had put Mitchell's chair at the far end.

"My daughter-in-law and I are here as shareholders," Constance said, and sat.

I took the chair next to her.

Mitchell came in last, in a clean suit, carrying a banker's box.

He set it on the table and did not sit.

Odette rose.

"Thank you all for coming at short notice," she said, in her warmest voice. "This is the hardest thing I've done for this company. Mitchell is my oldest friend. He has not been well."

She passed around two letters on a physician's letterhead.

*Acute stress reaction. Impaired judgment. Recommend leave from executive duties.*

"He has made erratic decisions this week," she went on. "He filed a self-incriminating report against his own company with the state, without counsel. He is entertaining accusations from a suspended pilot with a grudge. And he is influenced by a wife in an unstable grief."

I felt Constance's hand land on my knee and stay there.

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