Chapter 18: Madam Chair

Hallie's POV

The boardroom of Appleton Holdings was on the fortieth floor, and at six in the morning the lake outside the glass was the color of pewter.

A dozen people sat at a table built for twenty.

At the head of it, in a wheelchair with an oxygen line under his nose, sat my father.

He had not shaved.

He wore a pressed shirt and a cardigan over a hospital bracelet he had not bothered to cut off.

Zane had driven me there at ninety miles an hour and said nothing the whole way except, "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"For falling asleep on the stairs with you."

"I'd do it again," I said, and watched his ears go red.

Now he stood behind my chair, and I stood at the foot of the table with my coat still on.

The board chairman was a heavy man with a gold pen.

He had my seven-year-old video paused on the screen behind him, at the moment the hotel door closed.

"Miss Thornbury," he said. "You understand this company has a reputation."

"I do."

"A young woman who drugs a man and takes him into a room is not a woman this board can place in charge of forty thousand employees."

"Then it's lucky she didn't," my father said.

His voice was a rasp, but the room went quiet.

"Bernard," said the chairman. "With respect, you're not well."

"I am dying. I'm clear-headed about it." He lifted the oxygen tube off his lip. "Play what came after it."

"The clip ends there."

"The story doesn't."

He nodded at Zane, who took a small black drive from his pocket and slid it across the table.

The screen changed.

It showed a courthouse, and a woman in a camel coat, shaking, saying that she had turned her head.

The board watched my mother confess to the whole city.

Nobody spoke when it ended.

One of the men at the far end rubbed his eyes.

The chairman put down his pen.

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