Chapter 10: The Auction

"Then tell me the rest," I said.

We were in his study on the top floor, with the lamp low and the lake black behind the glass.

Ansel stood by the bookshelf with his hands in his pockets.

"Two years ago I started buying Amesbury Freight's bank debt," he said. "Through three shell companies. I own most of what the company owes."

I stared at him.

"All of it?"

"Enough. If I call the notes, Roland has ninety days to pay or the lenders take the fleet."

"And you didn't tell me."

"No."

"You sat in your car and let me write a contract on a napkin, while you owned his throat."

"Yes."

"You let me think I was saving my sister with a napkin."

"You are saving her," he said. "I only meant to pull the rope in my own time."

"With me as the bait."

"With you as the reason I couldn't do it yet."

He took a breath.

"If I call the notes today, the company burns, and your twenty percent goes with it."

"I wasn't going to do that to you."

I sat down on the edge of his desk.

It was a lot to take in at once.

It was also, I realized, the first honest thing he had said that was actually about me.

"There's something else," I said.

"Is there?"

"The auction."

He closed his eyes.

"Two years ago," I said. "The Children's Hospital gala."

"You bid forty thousand dollars on a dinner with me, in front of two hundred people."

"I wasn't asked, and I wasn't told. I found out when the auctioneer said my name."

"Jo."

"I was a prize. A woman my size, paraded up for a rich man's amusement, and the room laughed."

"The room didn't laugh."

"I was in the coat room, and I heard it."

"You heard the clapping," Ansel said. "That was for the hospital. The laughing came from Roland's table."

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