The Mistress in the Room novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Assistant Flips

The partners met on the nineteenth floor of my mother's family's building, in a conference room with a view of the river.

Six of them sat at the long table.

At the head sat the senior partner, a silver-haired man who had signed Douglas's first lease and never liked him.

Douglas was not there.

The assistant had told me he was in a client lunch until two.

I walked in at one-thirty with the assistant at my side and the banker's box in her arms.

Evan came in behind us and took a place against the wall by the door, with his arms folded.

"Mrs. Lindahl," said the senior partner. "I had not been told you were attending."

"I'm the landlord. I thought I should be."

A younger partner started to object, and the senior partner raised a hand.

"Sit."

I sat.

The assistant put the box on the table and lifted the lid.

"Six years of rent," she said. "For an apartment on Sheridan Road. I coded it to consulting at Mr. Lindahl's request. The total is a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars."

Nobody spoke.

A woman at the far end of the table picked up the top invoice and held it to the light.

"This is the firm's money."

"It is."

"For his mistress."

"For a woman he's described to me as his friend from college," said the assistant, and her voice shook only once. "She's six months pregnant by him."

"We have read the posts," said the younger partner. "We took it for a family matter."

"It stopped being a family matter when it came out of your accounts."

I laid Douglas's second phone on the table.

I had printed the thread and put the pages in a folder, but the phone was better.

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