Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
There’s a thing I told a board of directors once, years ago, when one of them asked how I’d built what I’d built so fast and so young.
I told them I had never once in my life let go of something that belonged to me.
It got a laugh. It wasn’t meant as one. It was the truest sentence I owned, the whole of my character in eleven words, and I have spent every year since proving it on anyone foolish enough to test it.
And here I stand behind my father-in-law’s desk, in the office that smells of a better man than me, letting go of the only thing I have ever owned that mattered.
The papers are between us on the desk, signed, my name black and final at the bottom where I put it an hour ago with a hand I would not permit to shake.
I have just told my wife she will never have to see me again, and I have said it in the coldest voice I have, because cold is the only wrapping I could find that wouldn’t fall open and show her what’s inside it.
She came through that door breathless and desperate and beautiful, about to say something, and I cut her off before she could, because I have learned what saying things does to her heart, and because I overheard, four days ago, exactly how she feels when she’s free to say what she likes.
He makes me sick. I have built the rest of my life around those four words.
The least I can do, the only decent thing left in me, is make it so she never has to look at the thing that sickens her again.
So I’ve set her free. It’s the most expensive thing I’ve ever given anyone and the first I’ve given without expecting to be paid back, and I brace myself now for the part where she takes up the pen, because watching her sign will be the price, and I’ve always been willing to pay.
“I’m sorry, Camilla.” It comes out grim, scraped, nothing like the thing it is. “For all of it. But most of all for nearly—” The word won’t come at first. I make it. “For nearly killing you. I’ll carry that. You don’t have to.”
She doesn’t take the pen.
She stands there on the other side of the desk and she looks at me, just looks, and her eyes fill, and then they spill, the tears coming without a sound, running down a face Loren is no longer here to fix, and she does not wipe them away and she does not look down at the papers and she does not reach for the pen.
She only stands there in the wreck of everything I’ve done and cries, looking at me as though I’m the one who has been hurt, and I cannot bear it, I find.
Of all the things I have stood and borne in this room and the rooms before it, this is the one I cannot.
My fists clench at my sides.
“You don’t have to pity me,” I tell her, and it comes out hard, because hard is what I have when everything else has run out.
“I’m not.” Her voice shakes, but the words are clear. “But you don’t have to lie to me either.”
And something gives way in my chest, some final wall I’ve been holding up with both hands for two months, because she’s right, she’s exactly right, she has looked straight through the cold and named the only lie left standing in this room, which is the divorce, which is this whole performance of letting her go as though letting her go were what I wanted.
I’m lying to her right now, with every signed page on this desk, and I’m tired.
Just unspeakably tired of the lying that the truth simply comes up out of me on its own.
“The only time I lied to you,” I say, “was when I told you I was thinking of replacing you with someone else.” I watch her go still. “And the only time I lied about you was when I told Bills that I only married you because of the Waymakers.”
“I heard you say that.” Her voice breaks clean in the middle of it. “I heard you, Trey.”
I jerk where I stand.
“You never said—you never said anything.” It’s barely sound.
The whole shape of the last two months is rearranging itself behind my eyes, fast and merciless, every cold thing she’s done suddenly wearing a different face, because if she heard me tell Bills I married her for the team, if she’s been carrying that since before the photographs, before the heir, before any of it, then he makes me sick was never what I built my life around four days ago.
It was a woman who believed the man she loved had only ever wanted her for a hockey contract.
It was grief. It was grief the whole time, and I called it revulsion and signed these papers on the strength of it.
“What can I say,” she whispers, “that won’t make me seem like I’m begging you to…” Her voice falters and dies.
“Beg what?”
She shakes her head, fast, the tears coming harder, refusing it.
And my heart slams once against my ribs, hard enough to hurt, because I can see what’s happening, I can see both of us standing here a single sentence apart from the only thing either of us wants and each too afraid of the other to cross it, and I have spent my whole life believing that the truth is a liability, a thing you give up only when it’s been pried out of you, a weakness.
I’m about to bet everything I have left on it being the opposite.
On it being the one thing that gets us out.
“If I beg you to forgive me?—”
“I already did.”
The speed of it nearly stops me. I make myself go on.
“—and not to leave me, so I can spend the rest of my life making it up to you, will you?—”
“Why do you want me to stay?”
And there it is, the question, the only one, and the cold man, the careful man, the man who has never once said a thing he couldn’t take back, looks at his weeping wife across a desk full of the proof of his own stupidity and does not hedge and does not calculate and does not protect himself even slightly.
“Because I love?—”
I don’t get to finish it.
She is already around the desk, already against me, the signed papers scattering off the edge and sailing white and meaningless to the floor where they belong, and her arms are around my neck and her wet face is against my throat and she’s saying it into my skin, over and over, the thing I have been dying for two months without knowing it was the thing I was dying for.
“I love you, Trey. I love you so much.”
I get my hands on her face. They’re shaking. I, who do not shake, hold my wife’s face in two shaking hands and tip it up to mine, and I tell her the truest sentence I own now, the one that’s replaced the eleven words I built my life on, the one that’s only three.
“I love you, Camilla.”
She can’t answer me.
I’m already kissing her.
?
Three floors below, at that same hour, in the glass-walled boardroom where Richard Ericsson had once run his whole world, Raymond Glasgow was perhaps ninety seconds from taking it.
He had the votes. He had counted them twice and bought half of them outright, and the best part, the part he’d been savoring all morning, was the empty chair at the head of the table.
Flint hadn’t even come. The cheap stranger hadn’t shown up to defend his own throne, and Raymond fully intended to read that absence into the record as the surrender of a man who knew he was finished.
“Then if there’s no further discussion,” Raymond said, “I’ll call the?—”
The doors opened.
Troy Barrymore walked in like he’d built the room, which, in a manner of speaking, his godfather had, and every head at the table turned to the one man none of them had thought to account for.
They had all made the same mistake, the same one Raymond had been making since the day the photographs first changed hands.
They had filed Troy under decoration. The golden boy in the pictures, the family friend, the pretty fixture at the edge of other people’s power.
Nobody had ever once stopped to wonder what the boy who’d grown up in the Ericsson house actually knew, or held, or had spent the last three weeks quietly assembling while everyone watched the husband instead.
“Sorry I’m late,” Troy said pleasantly, and dropped a leather folder on the table in front of Greaves. “Don’t let me stop the vote. I only thought somebody ought to be here to cast the Ericsson shares.”
Raymond’s smile slipped its first inch. “Those shares have no voice in this room. Camilla isn’t?—”
“Camilla’s indisposed.” Troy opened the folder with one finger.
“So she signed her proxy over to me while she was lying in a hospital bed your little ball put her in. The whole family bloc. And as of nine o’clock this morning, so did her husband.
Every share Trey Flint controls.” He nodded once at the second set of papers, crisp and notarized beneath the first. “You’ll find it all in order, Raymond.
I had very good lawyers go over it twice, because I knew you’d want to be sure. ”
The number hit the table like a dropped safe.
The Ericsson family bloc plus every vote Flint owned, and it was not close, it had never once been close from the second Troy crossed the threshold, and every man at that table ran the arithmetic at the same instant and arrived in the same place, which was that Raymond Glasgow had just lost, in public, in the room he had chosen for his own coronation.
And then came the part Troy had been looking forward to all week.
The doors opened a second time. Two uniformed officers came through them, and behind the officers a heavyset man in a tired suit with a badge clipped to his belt, and the boardroom went very still.
“Raymond Glasgow?”
Raymond came to his feet so fast his chair went over behind him.
“You’re under arrest.” The detective said it almost kindly, the way Troy supposed a man learned to say it after enough times.
“Bribery of board members. Conspiracy and fraud. And the deliberate, well-documented defamation of Camilla Flint, which her attorneys will be very glad to walk you through.” A small pause.
“We’ll have a good deal more by morning.
Men carrying gambling debts the size of yours tend to leave a trail a mile wide. ”
Raymond said his own innocence. He said lawyer.
He said a great many things as they walked him out past the long table of men who had been eating from his hand ninety seconds earlier and would now swear to anyone listening that they’d never trusted him, and Troy didn’t bother to listen to a word of it, because the boardroom had erupted into the particular roar of a dozen powerful people all working out at once which way the wind had been blowing the whole time.
He took out his phone.
He found the thread he wanted, the one he’d labeled, because he was a man who enjoyed his own jokes, Mr & Mrs Flint, and he typed with both thumbs while the detective read Raymond Glasgow his rights somewhere behind him.
Mission accomplished. You guys owe me.
He hit send, slid the phone back into his pocket, and went to go find out whether the two idiots he’d just saved had finally managed to figure it out for themselves.