Chapter 6

The shareholder meeting to approve the audit and the management change was held on the first Friday of April, in the same conference room on the river. Pilar came in the morning, in the deep-green velvet blazer, with her mother's rings on her right hand and the letter folded in her pocket — not because she needed it anymore, but because she liked to carry it.

Harris was at the meeting. He had to be, under the bylaws. He sat at the opposite end of the conference table, in a gray suit instead of the navy cashmere, and his face was a careful blank. The two managers sat on either side of him. Daniel sat beside Pilar, his portfolio open, the audit summary on the table in front of him.

The meeting was short. That was the thing Pilar had learned about power: when you have it, you don't need to perform it. She called the meeting to order, presented the audit summary, moved that the company retain an independent manager to oversee day-to-day operations while the books were cleaned and the reimbursements collected, and she gave Harris the floor.

He did not use it well. He argued — the same arguments she'd heard for twenty-two years, that he'd built the company, that the expenses were legitimate, that he was being persecuted by a woman who was bitter about a divorce. But the numbers were on the table, and the numbers did not support him, and the room could feel the shape of it. He argued, and then he stopped. He looked down the long table at Pilar, and his face did something it had never done in all the years she'd known him.

It went quiet. Not angry. Not calculating. Just quiet, the way a room goes quiet when it has run out of things to say.

"I never thought you'd read the clause," he said, and his voice was low, almost gentle, almost — Pilar thought — like the man she'd married, before the company, before the house, before the new wife with the rehearsed smile. "I didn't think you'd ever read it. You signed it so fast, when you sold the shop. You trusted me."

"I did trust you," Pilar said. "You made it a mistake to."

"I know." He said it so simply that Pilar felt the room shift. "I know I did." He looked down at the table, at his hands, at the wedding band he still wore on his left hand. "I shouldn't have told you to slide out of the photo. That was — that was cruel. It was cruel for no reason, and I did it anyway, and I've been ashamed of it every night since."