Gabriela looked at her with an expression that contained something warm and something slightly amused and something else underneath both of those that Megan still could not quite read. "What's the figure?"Megan opened her mouth, and then hesitated, because the number, which had seemed perfectly reasonable in the quiet of her home office at two in the morning when she was building the proposal with the particular optimism that late nights sometimes produce, now felt enormous and slightly presumptuous sitting in this elegant office across from this woman who had just demonstrated, rather dramatically, that she possessed the authority and the will to reshape situations with immediate and decisive effect."Sixty million dollars," she said, and her voice dropped on the last three words, not to a whisper exactly, but to the register of someone who has said something slightly audacious and is instinctively trying to soften its impact by reducing its volume, as though the number might sound

She reached for him and pulled him into a hug that was fierce and genuine, her arms around his shoulders, her face against his neck, and she felt rather than heard the small sound she made that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob and was entirely out of her control."Thank goodness," she said, pulling back to look at his face, her eyes bright with something too large to be contained in a single expression. "Thank God. You hear me? You are part of this family now, properly and officially, and nobody is ever going to say otherwise again, not after this. This worked out. All of it, this absolutely insane morning, all of it somehow worked out." She shook her head slightly, marveling at the shape of it, the improbability of the path that had led here. "You should have seen how she treated me in that office. Like I was the one with all the power. Like I was someone who needed to be looked after. She made me tea, Ethan, herself, with her own hands, and she brought out dessert, and she sa

Megan considered this, and found, when she examined her own reaction, that she agreed with him, not reluctantly, not after argument, but directly and without particular hesitation, which surprised her mildly because the James family had a kind of ambient social power that usually made people careful about how openly they criticized them, even in private, even in cars with the windows up."You're right," she said simply. "That family is not innocent in any of this. They never have been. Who hasn't heard the stories? Who hasn't known someone who got too close to one of their business dealings and came out the other side with less than they went in with? They are not a clean family. They have never been a clean family. I'm not shocked that this is happening, I'm shocked that someone finally had the nerve to make it happen, knowing how powerful they are. But shocked on their behalf?" She shook her head. "No. They have destroyed too many people for me to perform sympathy they haven't earne

Megan opened her mouth to answer, but before any words could emerge, her phone began to ring in her hand, the sudden sound breaking into the quiet of the car with the intrusive urgency that phone calls always seem to carry when they arrive unexpectedly, and she glanced down at the screen with the reflexive irritation of someone whose attention has just been redirected against their will.The name on the screen stopped her."It's my father," she said, and there was genuine surprise in her voice, surprise mixed with something more complicated, something that contained old hurt and newer wariness and the particular guardedness of someone who has learned through experience that contact from this particular source rarely arrives without complications attached to it. "He hasn't called me in years. Literal years. I can't even remember the last time his name appeared on my phone."Ethan looked at the screen, then back at her face. "He probably heard that you've gotten yourself back," he said.

Megan listened to the rest of her father's words with an expression that had hardened into something unreadable, something far past the point where his tone or his manufactured urgency could reach her anymore, and when he finally paused for breath she spoke, and her voice carried none of the heat that had colored it a moment earlier, only a flat, deliberate steadiness that was somehow far more cutting than anger would have been."I can hear that you don't actually have anything important to say to me," she said. "Nothing real. Nothing that matters. And I'm not going to waste any more breath defending myself to you, or defending him, or explaining anything else, because nothing I say is going to change what you've already decided to believe, and nothing you say is going to change what I already know to be true." She paused, letting the silence stretch just long enough to make her next words land with their full weight. "You were never there. Not once, not when it actually counted, not