He Signed the Divorce Without Reading Page Nine novel · Chapter 46 of 48

Chapter 46: The Last Signature

Claire's POV

Nathaniel had not let go of my hand since the stairwell.

He had asked "Are you sure?" twice on the way up.

I had said, "I am never late," twice.

The second time, he laughed out loud in the lift.

Then he went white and asked if I had eaten anything, and a clerk had to bring me a croissant.

"Tell no one," I said. "Not until I know."

"Not one person," he said, and grinned at the floor all the way to the boardroom.

The Family Council met again at three o'clock that afternoon, and this time nobody sat in the chair at the head of the table.

Harold's old seat stood empty, pushed back an inch from the table.

Thirty relatives took their places around it.

Nathaniel and I stood at the foot, where he had put us that morning, and I realized that nobody had told us to sit.

Harold's sister rapped her cane on the floor.

"I will take the chair for today," she said, "since my brother does not need it."

Nobody argued.

"First matter. We voted this morning to remove Harold. We vote again now, in writing, so that no lawyer can say we were frightened."

Twenty-nine hands went up, and the thirtieth belonged to the empty chair.

"Carried," she said, and wrote it down herself in a large, shaky hand.

"Second matter."

She looked down the table at me.

"Madame Winslow. I am told you read everything you sign."

"I try to."

"Then you will read this."

A young man at her elbow slid a document down the polished wood.

It was the family charter, the same thick packet Harold had held out in my grandmother's rose garden.

I opened it to Section Fourteen and read it standing up.

A Rhodes who marries without the written consent of the Chairman loses the chief executive's seat and every voting share on the day of the marriage.

"My brother wrote that," the old woman said, "in a bad year. Nobody read it for thirty years, until the day he needed it against his own son. Strike it out, please."

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