Chapter 25: The Chair

Every camera in the ballroom swung to the gold card.

Veronica didn't flinch.

She picked up her cane, stood, and smoothed the front of her skirt.

"I've never met that woman outside a business meeting," she said, to nobody in particular.

Then she walked out through the kitchen doors, and two cameramen ran after her into the steam.

The clip of Trina pointing had twenty million views by morning.

The clip of Veronica walking away had thirty.

On the first Tuesday in September, Kenley Nutrition held its annual shareholders' meeting on the third floor of the glass tower on Market Street.

Emerson had asked me on a Thursday night at the Kitchen, standing on the sidewalk, as usual.

"I need a metabolic physician to explain a medical record to a room full of people who sell protein shakes."

I was thirty-three weeks along, and my ankles hated the elevator.

The meeting room had a long table for the board and rows of chairs for everyone else.

Family trusts. A pension fund in a gray suit. Two hundred employees with stock in their retirement plans, in lanyards, holding coffee.

Veronica sat in the center chair at the long table.

The silver tie sat at her elbow.

She opened the meeting at ten exactly, with a gavel she clearly loved.

"First order of business," she said. "The vote to reappoint the chair."

"Point of order," Emerson said from the end of the table.

The room went still.

"New business first. It concerns the chair."

He didn't wait for her to allow it.

He stood up, and his assistant dimmed the lights, and the screen behind the table came on.

The first slide was a page from his father's address book.

V. says overdose. Ask about the ammonia.

"My uncle died when he was twenty-eight," Emerson said. "My mother's brother. The family called it an overdose. It wasn't. Dr. Mayhew?"

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