Ex-Husband, Inc

Chapter 3: The Meeting

Sinclair Group's headquarters took up twelve floors of glass and steel downtown, with Gerald's office sitting right at the top, where he could look out over half the city he thought he owned.

Marcus had been in that office maybe a dozen times in three years of marriage. Always as Naomi's husband. Never as anyone Gerald thought was worth a real conversation.

Today would be different.

He wore the same jacket he always wore — the worn brown one, the one Vanessa liked to joke about at dinner. Teddy had offered to send over a suit that morning. Marcus said no. Let them see exactly who they thought they already knew.

The receptionist on the top floor didn't recognize him at first. Then she did, and her smile flickered, confused, like her brain couldn't line up "Marcus Kane, Naomi's ex-husband" with "the man Mr. Sinclair has been waiting on all morning for a meeting about Meridian Holdings."

"Mr. Kane," she said slowly. "Are you... here to see Mr. Sinclair?"

"He's expecting the ownership group behind Meridian," Marcus said. "That's me."

She blinked. Picked up the phone. Marcus could hear her voice shaking a little as she spoke into it, too quiet for him to make out the words. A minute later, the double doors to Gerald's office opened, and Gerald himself stood there, still in the middle of asking, "Where's the — "

He saw Marcus. He stopped.

"What are you doing here?" Gerald said. Not angry yet. Just confused, the way a man gets when the wrong piece shows up in the wrong puzzle.

"You asked to speak with the ownership group behind Meridian Holdings," Marcus said. "Here I am."

Gerald let out a short laugh, the kind that comes out before a person's brain has caught up. "I don't have time for jokes today, Marcus. I've got a real meeting."

"This is the real meeting."

Something in Marcus's voice made Gerald's laugh die out. He looked past Marcus, like he expected someone else to be standing behind him — a lawyer, an assistant, the actual person he was waiting for. There was no one else there.

"Come in," Gerald said, slower now.

The office smelled like leather and old money. Gerald walked around behind his desk, the way he probably did with every man he'd ever tried to make feel small in this room, and sat down without offering Marcus a chair.

Marcus sat down anyway.

"Let's not waste each other's time," Marcus said. "You've got a lease offer on the table from Dominic Vale for this building. You're trying to figure out who actually holds the land underneath it, because Vale's people hit a wall six layers down in the ownership records. You called Meridian Holdings this morning because that's the name at the bottom of that wall."

Gerald's face had gone very still.

"How do you know that," Gerald said. It wasn't really a question anymore.

"Because I'm Meridian Holdings," Marcus said. "All of it. Every shell company, every holding, every piece of paper with somebody else's name printed on top of mine. Ten years of it."

For a long moment, Gerald just looked at him. Marcus watched something behind the man's eyes try to rearrange three years of dinner table jokes into a shape that made sense, and fail.

"That's not possible," Gerald said, but his voice had lost its certainty. "You worked construction jobs. You never—"

"I worked construction jobs because it kept me busy while the real work happened somewhere you weren't looking," Marcus said. "You spent three years asking me when I was going to build something with my life. I already had. You just never once asked to see it."

Gerald stood up so fast his chair rolled back and hit the window behind him.

"This is a stunt," he said. "Some kind of — I don't know what this is, but it's not real. Meridian Holdings has been buying up half this city for a decade. You're telling me a man who couldn't hold down a real job did that?"

"I'm telling you a man you never once thought was worth a real job did that," Marcus said. He kept his voice calm. He'd waited three years to say this, and he wasn't going to waste it by raising his voice now. "While you were busy telling everyone at your table I was a waste of a chair, I was buying the chair. And the table. And the building the table's sitting in."

"Prove it."

Marcus reached into his jacket — the same worn brown jacket — and set a single folded page on Gerald's desk. Gerald snatched it up like it might disappear if he didn't move fast enough. His eyes moved down the page, and Marcus watched the exact moment they landed on his own name, six layers down, right where Teddy had left it.

M. Kane — Controlling Member.

The paper shook a little in Gerald's hand. Just a little.

"You've been planning this," Gerald said quietly. "Since when?"

"Longer than you'd like to know."

"Does Naomi know?"

"No," Marcus said, and for the first time since he'd walked in, something in his voice wasn't quite as steady. "She doesn't know any of it."

Gerald sat back down slowly, like his legs had stopped fully working. He set the page on the desk between them and stared at it, the way a man stares at a bill he can't afford.

"What do you want," he said. Not fighting anymore. Just asking.

Marcus stood up. He hadn't come here to answer that question today. That question was going to take a lot longer to answer than one meeting, and he wanted Gerald to sit with it a while before he got to hear the answer.

"You'll find out," Marcus said. "One piece at a time."

He walked to the door, then stopped, hand on the handle, and looked back at the man who'd spent three years calling him nothing across a dinner table.

"Enjoy the view while it's still yours," Marcus said, and left Gerald Sinclair alone in an office twelve floors above a building that, as of this morning, was no longer entirely his.