Chapter 9 Griffins Move
The board's response to Harold's petition arrived considerably faster than anyone had anticipated, and considerably less favorably, in the form of an emergency meeting called for the following Monday, ostensibly to review the petition for independent investigation into Griffin's conduct, but which Weston understood immediately, the moment he read the meeting notice, to be something else entirely.
"He's counterattacking," Weston said, reading the notice over breakfast, his coffee going cold beside him.
"This isn't a review of the petition. Look at the agenda.
He's requesting the board formally examine the circumstances of our marriage as a preliminary matter, before any discussion of his own conduct, which means he's found something, or he's convinced enough board members that he's found something, and he wants the marriage itself under formal scrutiny before anyone looks too closely at what he's actually been doing for the past year. "
Addie set down her own coffee, feeling the specific cold drop of adrenaline she'd started to associate with any mention of the board's growing scrutiny. "What could he have found."
"I don't know," Weston said. "But I know who to ask."
Harold arrived within the hour, his expression carrying none of the cautious optimism from the previous week, replaced instead by a grim focus Addie hadn't seen from him since the initial reading of the charter clause.
"Griffin's attorneys filed a formal request yesterday afternoon for a deposition," he said, without preamble, settling into the study's leather chair across from Weston's desk.
"Not of either of you directly, not yet.
Of your household staff. Specifically, Mrs. Alcott, and Marguerite. "
"Why the staff," Addie asked.
"Because household staff see things board members and clients never do," Harold said.
"Whether you sleep in the same room. Whether you eat meals together or separately.
Whether the marriage, in the private, unguarded moments nobody performs for, actually resembles what you're presenting publicly.
Griffin's investigator has apparently spent the last week attempting to interview staff informally, off the record, and I understand at least one household employee was approached directly outside a grocery store two days ago and offered money for information. "
Weston's expression went very cold. "Who."
"Marguerite," Harold said. "She reported it to Mrs. Alcott immediately, who reported it to me this morning, which is, I want to note, exactly the kind of loyalty that should reassure you both, even as it confirms exactly how aggressive Griffin's investigation has become.
Marguerite declined the offer and told the man, according to her account, that she'd worked for this family for eleven years and had no intention of selling out people she considered close to her own family for a stranger's money. "
Addie felt a complicated mix of gratitude and fury settle into her chest, gratitude for Marguerite's loyalty, fury at the specific violation of having a stranger approach a member of her own household with money in exchange for private information about her marriage.
"What does the deposition request mean practically.
Can he actually compel Mrs. Alcott and Marguerite to testify. "
"Within the scope of the board's own bylaws, yes, if the board votes to authorize it, which given the current composition of the board is not a certainty either direction," Harold said.
"It's a twelve-member board. Four have historically sided with your grandfather's judgment, and by extension, generally side with you.
Three have been quietly courted by Griffin for the better part of two years and will almost certainly vote in his favor.
That leaves five genuinely undecided votes, people who respected your grandfather but have real concerns about a marriage this suddenly convenient, and Monday's meeting is going to be an argument for those five votes, nothing more and nothing less. "
Weston stood and moved to the study's window, looking out over the same view of the harbor that had greeted him from the bank's conference room two weeks earlier, and Addie watched the tension gather in his shoulders, the specific posture of a man calculating every possible outcome of a fight he hadn't chosen but now had to win regardless. "What do we need to do before Monday."
"Prepare," Harold said. "Not a performance, I want to be clear about that, given everything I've watched between the two of you these past two weeks.
I mean actual preparation, in the sense of anticipating every question the undecided board members might reasonably ask, and having honest, considered answers ready rather than scrambling for them in the room.
I also strongly recommend you both attend together, present a united front from the moment you walk in, and that Mrs. Calloway be prepared to speak for herself rather than simply standing beside you looking supportive.
Boards respond to competence, and from everything I've seen this past week, Mrs. Calloway has demonstrated considerably more of it than most of the people in that boardroom currently give her credit for. "
Addie felt a flicker of something steadier than fear at that, a recognition that whatever came on Monday, she had genuine standing in this fight beyond simply being Weston's wife, that the research she'd done tracing Griffin's shell companies had already proven her capable of navigating exactly this kind of institutional combat.
The days leading up to Monday's meeting passed in a blur of preparation, Harold walking them both through the specific bylaws governing the board's authority, Weston briefing Addie on the personalities and histories of each undecided board member with the same thoroughness he brought to every major negotiation, and Addie, in turn, compiling a supplementary dossier on Griffin's pattern of acquisitions that Harold agreed to have ready as a rebuttal should the meeting's tone turn adversarial enough to require it.
It was Thursday evening, three days before the scheduled meeting, when Vivian Castellane's true purpose finally surfaced in a way neither of them had anticipated.
Addie was leaving her workshop after a long day catching up on delayed restoration contracts, locking the door behind her in the fading evening light, when she found the woman waiting beside her car, her polished gala composure replaced by something considerably more direct.
"Mrs. Calloway," Vivian said. "I wondered if I might have a moment."
"I don't have anything to say to you," Addie said, keeping her keys in hand, aware of the specific vulnerability of an empty street at the end of a long day.
"I understand the impulse to say that," Vivian said, "but I think you'll want to hear this before Monday's meeting, because it concerns something I don't believe your husband has told you, and I think you deserve to hear it from someone rather than be blindsided by it in front of the entire board."
Addie's stomach dropped, some instinct warning her this was exactly the kind of manipulation Harold had described, an attempt to plant doubt before the meeting, to fracture the united front they'd spent days building, and yet some other instinct, the same one that had driven her to trace Griffin's shell companies through four layers of holding structures, made her stay rather than walk away. "Say it, then."
"Your husband met with Camille Fournier three weeks ago," Vivian said.
"Two days before he came to your workshop with this marriage proposal.
A private dinner, no witnesses beyond the restaurant staff, no explanation on record for the meeting.
I think you should ask him why, and I think you should ask him why he never mentioned it, because in my experience, men who are genuinely committed to the woman they've just married don't generally have quiet dinners with their exes right before the wedding without telling anyone. "
Addie felt the ground shift slightly beneath her, a specific, cold uncertainty she hadn't experienced since the earliest, most anxious hours after Weston's initial proposal, and she hated, immediately, how effective the tactic was, how precisely it targeted the one insecurity she hadn't fully examined, whether Weston's proposal had been entirely about her, or whether some part of it had been about proving something to himself first.
"I'll ask him," Addie said, keeping her voice steady through considerable effort. "And I trust that whatever the answer is, it will make considerably more sense than whatever story you're hoping I'll build in my head between now and then."
"I hope so, for your sake," Vivian said, and there was something almost like genuine sympathy in her expression, quickly smoothed away.
"For what it's worth, Mrs. Calloway, I don't relish this part of the job.
But Griffin pays considerably better than my conscience, and I have my own reasons for needing the money that have nothing to do with your marriage. "
Addie drove home with her hands tight on the wheel, replaying every moment of the past three weeks, searching for some memory of Weston mentioning Camille that she might have simply forgotten in the rush of everything else, and finding nothing, no reference, no explanation, nothing except the specific silence of a piece of information he had apparently decided, for whatever reason, not to share with her.
She found him in his study when she arrived home, and something in her face must have telegraphed the confrontation ahead, because he was on his feet before she'd said a single word.
"What happened."
"You had dinner with Camille," Addie said.
"Three weeks ago. Two days before you came to my workshop with the proposal.
I want to hear about it from you, and I want to understand why I'm hearing about it for the first time from Griffin's investigator standing outside my own workshop instead of from you. "
Weston's expression, for the first time since the charter clause had first upended both their lives, showed something that looked genuinely, unmistakably like guilt.