Chapter 22: The Firm

The Harcourt building stood four stories high on Main Street, with a brass door and a marble lobby.

I had walked past it every day of my life.

I had never once gone in the front.

At nine on Tuesday morning Conway pushed the brass door open in his work boots.

I walked in beside him.

Two hundred people were waiting.

They filled the lobby, the staircase and the balcony above.

Clerks, drivers, accountants, the night guards, the cleaning crew in their gray smocks.

They had been told to come.

They stood in rows and said nothing.

Eleanor was at the foot of the stairs.

She wore navy and no pearls, and she held her handbag with both hands.

Tobias stood three steps behind her, in the gray suit.

"Mr. Redfern," said the oldest of the accountants, a man with a bow tie. "We have been instructed to receive you."

"Conway is fine."

"Sir."

"Conway."

A small laugh went through the room.

Conway walked to the center of the lobby and stopped beneath the chandelier.

He took a folded sheet from his jacket and held it up.

"This is the form every one of you signed on your first day," he said.

"It says you will never discuss what you see or hear in a Harcourt house or office."

"It says if you do, you lose your pension."

Nobody moved.

"Most of you signed it at twenty."

He looked at the cleaning crew.

"Some of you signed it beside Annalise's mother."

My throat closed.

"She cleaned this building for twenty years," Conway said. "She kept a secret that cost her."

"She kept it because this paper told her she had to."

He tore the form in half.

Then he tore it again.

"As of this morning, no one in this company is bound by it."

"Anyone who was punished for speaking can come to me, and I will fix it."

The sound that rose from the staircase wasn't applause.

It was a breath let out by two hundred people at once.

Then they did clap.

The woman who had stood up at the gala, the one from table nine, clapped with both hands over her head.

Eleanor stood very white.

"I have one more thing," Conway said.

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