Chapter 7: Desk 11

On Monday morning my half-sister was sitting in my chair.

She had pulled it up to my drafting table, switched on my lamp, and tipped her glass of iced coffee onto my blotter.

My nameplate was in the wastebasket under the desk.

"Oh," Ottilie said, looking up with enormous eyes. "I didn't know you were coming in. They said you'd be off, with everything."

Studio B was a long room of drafting tables and skylights on the eighteenth floor, and all twenty-six people in it had gone quiet.

I had walked in with Jorie on one side of me and my green notebook under my arm.

Ewan had left the house at six, in the dark, in a suit.

He'd kissed my forehead in the kitchen and said nothing about what we'd done, only "I'll see you at ten," and gone.

I fished my nameplate out of the wastebasket.

I blew a coffee ground off the brass and set it back on the corner of the desk, squarely.

"Ottilie," I said. "You're in my seat."

"Dexter said I could."

"Dexter isn't the one who owns the seat."

"Good morning, everyone," said Dexter's voice behind me.

He came across the studio in a cream turtleneck and the round glasses, with a face arranged for sympathy.

He'd had a whole weekend to work out what sort of man he would be.

"I want to say something about Friday," he said, turning to the room. "Because you've all heard.

"Briony is going through a hard time."

Twenty-six faces turned toward me with the awful softness people use for the recently bereaved.

"There was an incident at our wedding.

"She hired an actor, and she paid someone to fake a video, to humiliate my family in front of two hundred guests.

"I'm not angry.

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