Chapter 18: The Holder

Lizzie's POV

On the sixty-eighth day I walked into the Brannigan Group's shareholder meeting in my navy coat and clean scrubs.

I had come off an early shift. Nobody had told me how to dress for this, and I had not asked.

The meeting was on the fortieth floor, in a room built to hold ninety people.

It held ninety-three. Directors sat at the long table, executives behind them, and small shareholders filled the folding chairs.

I stopped in the doorway.

Every head turned, as it had in the kitchen doorway at Dad's funeral lunch.

This time nobody whispered housekeeper.

My mother sat in the back row in her good canvas jacket. Beside her sat the tiny white-haired woman with the bumblebee pin and the cane.

They were holding hands. I hadn't known they had met.

The old woman raised her cane an inch off the carpet, which I took for a salute.

Tobias stood against the wall with no badge on his jacket.

Anthony was at the far end, by the window. He wore a gray suit and kept his hands at his sides.

He didn't come toward me. He looked at me once, then at the table.

I had read his courier envelope on the sixty-first day, in the clinic break room, and read it again that night.

A judge had thrown out Rowan's petition the next morning, before it reached a second page. There was nothing left to say.

I still hadn't called him. I hadn't decided what I would say.

Rowan stood at the head of the table, where my father had sat for forty years.

"We're a few minutes late," he said, without a glance at me. "Let's begin with the chairmanship."

"One moment, Mr. Brannigan."

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