Chapter 6: The Green Chair

At seven the next morning my doorman called up to my apartment and told me not to come down.

The Group owned the building, and I had lived on its twelfth floor for nineteen years.

I came down anyway.

A crowd stood on the sidewalk, and half of them were holding phones.

A woman in a blue coat pushed a microphone at me before I reached the curb.

"Ms. Clifford, is it true you've collected sixty percent of Willoughby's profit for doing nothing?"

I stopped.

Behind her, on a bus shelter screen, was my own face.

It was a photograph from a restaurant three years ago.

I sat at a white table with a glass of champagne, and the picture had been cropped to cut out the people at the table with me.

Across it ran two words in red: THE FREELOADER.

Below the headline was a line of text.

Sources close to the company say she has not attended one meeting in eleven years.

Camille had been busy.

"Ms. Clifford?" the reporter said again. "Do you want to respond?"

My phone buzzed with a message from my building manager.

It said the Group had ordered my unit cleared by morning for a new tenant.

I looked up at the twelfth floor.

A moving van stood at the curb with its ramp down.

Two men were carrying a chair out of the lobby.

It was my chair, the green one I had reupholstered in 1962.

"Stop that," I said.

They stopped and looked at each other.

One of them held up a work order.