Chapter 14: Midnight

The first phone flashlight came on near the front.

Then another, and another, until the whole terrace was lit by small white circles held up in two hundred hands.

They lit the oak, and the gravel, and the faces.

They lit my father, standing beside the grey box with his hand still on the handle.

My mother's voice finished its last sentence and ran out into a soft hiss.

Nobody clapped.

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

"Turn the lights back on," Lydia said, shrill, to no one. "Turn them on, turn them on."

"Leave them," the white-haired man in the front row said.

"I'd like to see what happens next."

Malcolm came up the steps of the platform with a flat black case under his arm.

He set it on the table beside my father's leather folder, and opened it.

Inside was a thick stack of paper with a ribbon across it, and a small brass seal.

"Gillian Whitman," he said, in his plain voice that carried without trying. "What time is it?"

A woman in the front row looked at her watch.

"Eleven fifty-eight," she said.

"Eleven fifty-eight," said Malcolm. "Your mother's trust gives you the controlling shares of Whitman Wine Group on the day you turn twenty-eight."

"My birthday starts at midnight," I said.

"It does."

"This is absurd," my father said.

His voice was hoarse, and nobody turned to look at him.

"She can't be handed a company in a field at midnight, by a hired man, on a terrace."

"I'm not a hired man," Malcolm said. "I'm the trustee, and I'm reading the document your lawyer has had in his office for fifteen years."

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