Chapter 21: The Insurance Money

The boardroom of Winslow Holdings was on the fourteenth floor, with a long walnut table and a view of the lake.

I had been inside it exactly once before, to deliver coffee.

On Tuesday at ten o'clock I walked in through its double doors with my mother on my arm.

Two security guards came forward with their hands out, and then stopped.

Behind me stood Dean and the surgeon in their good jackets, filling the corridor.

Eight people sat around the table with folders open in front of them.

Mr. Winslow sat at the head, in the chair that had belonged to his wife for twenty years.

Kaitlyn sat in a visitor's seat against the wall, very upright, with a legal pad.

"We're in the middle of a vote," said a gray-haired director near the foot.

"I'm sure you are," I said.

"Item four."

The gray-haired man glanced down at his agenda.

"Release of the Kinsella escrow.

Two point four million dollars.

The motion is to release it to Mrs. Hannah Kinsella.

It comes with a full waiver of claims against this company, the Little Hearts Fund and its chair."

"A waiver of claims," I said.

"It's a generous settlement."

"It's a gag," said Hannah.

She stood at my side in the navy dress with the small gravy stain.

She had worn it on purpose.

"Frank took out that policy the week our daughter was born," she said.

"Forty-one dollars a month.

He said if anything happened to him, I'd have something to stand on.

When he died, the insurance company paid it into a court account, because your foundation said we'd caused a crash."

The room had gone very quiet.

"We won that case," Hannah said.

"The judge ordered every cent returned to me, within thirty days.

Eleven years later I'm standing in your office, asking for it."

"There was a clerical delay," said the gray-haired man.

"For eleven years?"

"The funds were placed in the company's treasury pending..."

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