He Waited for Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 15 of 48

Chapter 15: The Vote

I didn't take the paper.

My mother took it for me, read it, and folded it in half.

"Her grandfather wrote that clause for drunks and gamblers," she said. "Not for a girl who was framed."

"Disrepute is disrepute," Bryant's father said. "The stock is down nine percent since Saturday. The board will decide what caused it."

Bryant stepped forward.

"You humiliated her in front of two hundred people."

"She humiliated herself," I said. "I just turned the lights on."

His hand came up.

He stopped it halfway, because the doorman was watching, and the elevator had just opened on a full car.

He turned his signet ring around his finger instead.

"Monday," he said. "Enjoy the weekend."

On Monday, June first, I walked into the boardroom at a quarter to nine.

This time there was a glass of water at my place.

My father came in at five to nine.

He had lost weight since April.

His collar stood away from his neck, and his face had that grayish cast again under the lights.

He touched my shoulder as he passed my chair.

"Whatever happens," he said quietly, "you sit up straight."

Nicholas wasn't in the room.

He was downstairs in the lobby with his single sheet of paper, the graphite contract, in case anybody remembered it.

Bryant's father called the meeting to order at nine exactly.

"First item. The conduct motion on Christina's trust votes."

I had prepared for this all weekend.

I stood up and laid the photographer's prints on the table, one by one.

"The charge was dropped. The district attorney is now asking Shelby Hartley questions. If the company has been embarrassed, look at who did the embarrassing."

One of the cousins picked up a print and set it down again without looking at it.

"Nobody doubts the photographs," Bryant's father said. "But every headline for six weeks has had your name in it. Stalking. Poisoning. Arrest. Whatever the truth, the market reads the headlines."

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