Chapter 16: The Photo

Ross's POV

The photo was on my phone by seven.

It had been taken from the trees across the cove with a long lens.

It showed me on my grandfather's dock at dawn, in yesterday's shirt.

I had Holly's coat in one hand and her hand in the other.

She was looking up at me.

I looked at it longer than I should have.

Then I called our general counsel, and she said what I had known she would say.

"The board chair has it. So does the Ledger. The board wants you at noon."

"Who sent it?"

"Two addresses, both new," she said. "Ross, I told you three times."

"You did."

I put the phone down on the nightstand and looked at the woman in my bed.

Holly was sitting up with the sheet around her, very pale and very steady.

"I'll go to the paper myself," she said. "I'll say what's true."

"You'll say nothing yet. I'll go first."

"That's not your fight."

"It's mine as of the stage," I said. "You just got there faster."

She almost smiled.

I kissed her once, hard, before I got up, because I did not know when I would get to again.

I did not say the thing I was thinking.

I was thinking that she had a daughter and a husband willing to burn her in the paper.

A woman in that spot might decide a quiet marriage was the safer room.

I thought it all the way to the city.

The boardroom at Ellery Mutual has a long table my grandfather bought in 1971.

Seven of the board sat at it, and the eighth chair held Derek.

He had been called in as the complainant.

He wore a charcoal suit and the face of a man who had been wronged and was being brave about it.

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