The Home She Built With Someone Else novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Costly Things

At nine the next morning, three hundred people stood in the Tornquist atrium, because the whole firm had been told to.

They stood under the glass model of the city, with coffee, wondering what had happened to the weekly schedule.

I stood near the back beside Gus.

"Did you know she was going to do this?" I asked.

"I knew she'd do something," Gus said. "She asked me for the stool."

There was a plain wooden stool by the brass plate wall.

Margot climbed onto it in a navy suit with her hair pinned flat.

She had no notes.

"Good morning," she said, and the room went quiet at once. "I need six minutes, and then you can go back to your drawings."

Her father stood at the edge of the crowd with his arms folded.

"Fourteen months ago I married a man named Nigel Clery," she said. "I kept it from every one of you, and from the board. This firm has a rule that spouses don't touch our projects, and I broke the spirit of it by hiding him."

Somebody near the front whispered.

"In March I filed for divorce. He hasn't signed. Last week he pitched this firm with plans that belonged to someone else, and I sat across from him as director and said nothing about who he was to me."

She did not look at me.

"I'm stepping down as director of residential design, effective now," she said. "Gus Brannigan will run the group until the board names someone."

The whisper became a sound.

"I didn't have to," she said over it. "The board didn't ask. I'm doing it because a director who hides things in a glass building should not be the one deciding who gets hired."

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