Chapter 17: The Corridor

Weston's POV

I left Delaney asleep in my bed at midnight with a note on the pillow.

It said: Gone to meet our problem. Back before the coffee. I mean that.

The car took me across town, and I thought about the corridor.

Two years ago, a Thursday, I had been on my way to the elevator when I heard my uncle's voice in the hall behind me.

"Your lawyer," Leland said. "Cross. Sharp girl."

"She's very good."

"Does she want more than the job?"

I had turned around slowly, and I had seen what he was looking at.

Delaney was down the hall at the copier, in a gray dress.

She had a pen in her teeth and a stack of pages against her hip.

She was reading the pages and humming.

My uncle was reading her too, and it was a look I knew from the boardroom, when he found a signature he could use.

I had been investigating the transfers for four months by then.

I knew exactly what kind of woman he liked to put in front of a mistake.

"Does she want more?" he said again.

I said the first cold thing that came into my head, in a voice I had practiced for the board.

"Counsel is furniture, Uncle. You don't ask furniture what it wants."

My uncle laughed and clapped my shoulder.

At the copier, the humming had stopped.

I did not look.

I told myself she had not heard.

For two years I told myself it was worth it, every time she looked through me.

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