The corner office had a view of the river.Liam had noticed this on the first day and had thought it was a good sign, the kind of thing that meant something, and then he had sat down at the desk and looked at the stack of documents his father’s assistant had placed there before he arrived, and the view had stopped meaning anything.The documents were organized by tab: executed partnership agreements, investor commitment letters, a municipal engagement plan for the outer Riverpoint commercial corridor, a draft press release about Hayes Resurgence’s development philosophy. Each of them had a yellow sticky note in the upper right corner in his father’s handwriting, initials and a date, which was how Mr. Hayes had always indicated that a document had been reviewed and approved and was no longer subject to discussion. The sticky notes were on documents that concerned a company of which Liam was the named chief executive.He read through the partnership agreements for two hours. They were c

The Grand Riverpoint Hotel had been doing this particular event for thirty-one years, and it showed in the confidence of the arrangements.The ballroom had been set for three hundred and twenty, the tables dressed in the hotel’s formal configuration, the kind with silver that had been polished that afternoon and crystal that caught the chandelier light at the angles it was supposed to catch it. The flowers were white. The programs were heavy stock. The room smelled of the specific combination of perfume and heated appetizers and old money that Nathan had grown up attending events inside of and had spent several years actively avoiding and was now standing at the entrance of with Cassandra beside him, both of them in the clothes they’d chosen carefully for reasons neither had discussed.He had not been in a room like this since before the cooperative, since before the name. He noticed that it looked smaller than he remembered and then noticed that it was the same size it had always bee

The Sterling family crest had been mounted on that wall since before Cassandra was born.She had spent her entire childhood reading it as permanence, the kind of thing that could not be moved without changing what the room meant, and she had spent most of her adult life developing a more precise understanding of what permanence actually was and wasn’t. She looked at it now from the chair across from her father’s desk and let it be what it had always been, which was wood and paint and the decision of a man long dead to mark something with a symbol.Her father had his hands flat on the desk in the way he had when he was going to say something he had already decided on. She recognized the posture from thirty years of watching him in negotiations, his own and others’, and she had learned from it the same thing she suspected most people who watched it closely learned: that the flat hands meant the position was fixed and the conversation was about compliance rather than deliberation.He sai

The gymnasium at the Whitmore Avenue Community Center had not been used for anything this large since a city-wide emergency meeting six years ago, when the school district had announced closures and three hundred parents had shown up with the particular energy of people who had nothing left to lose by being loud.Tonight was quieter than that, which was its own kind of power.Nathan watched them come in from the side door he’d arrived through with Marcus and Renata, the folding chairs filling from the front first the way they always did when people genuinely wanted to hear rather than be seen, the gymnasium going from empty to full to beyond its intended capacity in thirty-five minutes. By six-fifty, the fire marshal limit had been exceeded by an amount that the community center director, a man named Forsyte who had been running the space for twelve years, was choosing not to acknowledge officially. The rear doors had been propped open and two portable speakers had been positioned out

The café was on a side street off the main corridor, the kind of place without a sign visible from the road, where the tables were small and the coffee was serious and the morning regulars read actual newspapers. Nathan arrived first and took the table in the back corner, and Cassandra came in twelve minutes later.She looked like someone who had been awake at four in the morning deciding something and had decided it and then been awake for the remainder of the night anyway. Not uncertain, just spent, the way you looked when the work of resolution had used up the energy that sleep was supposed to restore.She sat down and ordered without looking at the menu and he waited.She said her father had moved quickly. The formal notification had come through Sterling family counsel at six-thirty the previous evening, two hours after the press conference, which meant the paperwork had been prepared before he stepped to the podium. She had been removed from the subsidiary entities she had been