He Signed the Divorce Without Reading Page Nine novel · Chapter 43 of 48

Chapter 43: The Family Council

The boardroom of Rhodes Family Holdings was on the top floor of a stone building off the Avenue Montaigne.

Thirty people sat around a table that could have held fifty.

They were aunts and cousins and old men with signet rings, and every one of them turned to look when Nathaniel pushed the door open.

Harold took the chair at the head.

He had put two seats for us at the very foot, farthest from the windows, with nothing in front of them.

I did not sit.

"Thank you all for coming at short notice," Harold said, in French and then in English. "My son has brought his wife. She has something she wishes to say about the family, and I have promised her the floor."

A man near the middle coughed.

An old woman in a gray suit, three seats from Harold, sat with both hands on her cane and did not look at me.

I took the plastic sleeve out of my coat and set it on the table in front of the empty chair.

"My name is Claire Winslow," I said. "I am married to Nathaniel Rhodes, and less than two weeks ago your Chairman walked into my wedding and told my husband he had forfeited his name."

"Hear, hear," someone said dryly, and a few people laughed.

"This is a letter on your company's paper," I said. "It was written in January, by the man at the head of this table. It says he will pay ninety million dollars for my grandmother's formulas five business days after my death."

The laughter stopped.

"A letter of intent," Harold said mildly. "A practice, nothing more."

"I thought so, too, until Saturday night."

I took out my phone and held it up.

"At twenty to nine that evening, after he left my farmhouse, your Chairman called his lawyer. His lawyer has recorded every call he took from this family for eleven years. Yesterday that lawyer was shot in the face on the steps of a church, one hour after he promised me everything."

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