Chapter 18: Nine Floors Up

The board voted at eleven, standing up, in the ballroom, with the waiters holding the dessert.

The older woman near the front moved that the chair step aside pending a review.

Nine directors seconded it before she finished the sentence.

Margaret did not argue.

She picked up her bag, and her gloves, and walked out through the kitchen doors rather than past the tables.

The lawyer in the gray overcoat started after her, then stopped.

He came back and sat down to wait for whoever would ask him questions.

Declan stood beside me through all of it.

When the doors closed, he spoke to the old woman, quietly, for a minute.

"I'm selling my shares," he told me in the cab.

"To the company's employee fund, at whatever price their lawyers set. I don't want a dollar of it."

"You're sure?"

"I've never been so sure of anything. Except one other thing."

"What?"

He didn't answer.

He looked at me across the dark cab, and his hand closed over mine on the seat.

His old apartment was on the ninth floor in Back Bay.

He hadn't lived in it for five years, and nobody had touched it.

A single lamp came on when he opened the door.

I saw a leather couch, a wall of windows, and the whole city laid out underneath them in small lights.

I stood at the glass.

I could see my own reflection in the green dress, and his behind me, taking off his jacket.

"You were magnificent," he said.

"I was shaking."

"You were magnificent and shaking."

He came up behind me and put his hands on my hips.

Keep reading free with an account. Start When He Finally Found Her, She Was Already Married from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.