Chapter 23: Forty Weeks and One Day

My father reopened Corr Capital on a Thursday, in the same atrium where the guards had walked him out.

The employees stood in the same half circle around the marble floor.

The oldest teller had come out of retirement for the day.

She sat in a folding chair in the front row, crying before he said a word.

I stood beside Rhiannon at the foot of the glass stairs, forty weeks and one day pregnant, in my gray cardigan.

"You should be on a couch," Rhiannon whispered. "With your feet up. And a nurse."

"You are the nurse."

"I'm off the clock. I'm here as a friend with a blood pressure cuff in her purse."

Quentin stood two steps behind me.

He had not left my side since breakfast.

He kept his hand an inch from my back, ready to catch me, and he hadn't touched it once.

My father walked up to the podium and put on his reading glasses.

"Twelve years ago," he said, "I signed a page that I should have read twice."

The room fell silent.

"A good man died because I was proud, and I let another man's lie speak for me."

"I'm saying it plainly, in front of the people who gave their working lives to this bank."

He found Quentin in the crowd.

"I'm sorry," my father said. "And I'm grateful to the son of the man I wronged, who didn't have to give this building back and did."

Somebody started to clap.

Then the whole atrium was clapping.

I felt a tug low in my belly, so deep and so sharp that I gasped.

Rhiannon's head turned.

"What was that?"

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