Chương 3
“I tried.”
“When?”
She looked at him then, fully.
“Twice.”
The word did more damage than shouting could have done.
He gripped the bed rail. “I never heard from you.”
“I know.”
“You had my number.”
“I had six numbers. Three stopped working. One belonged to an assistant who said you were unavailable indefinitely. One reached a legal department that asked whether I was threatening you. The last one rang until the voicemail box filled.”
“You could have come to me.”
“I did.”
His fingers loosened from the rail.
Sloan watched the memory arrive in him, though not all of it. Not yet.
Nine years earlier, on a wet Thursday morning, she had stood in the lobby of Drake Tower wearing a green coat that no longer closed over her stomach. Griffin had crossed the mezzanine above her with three lawyers and his father. He had looked down.
Their eyes had met.
He had not stopped.
“You saw me,” she said.
“I didn’t know you were pregnant.”
“You knew I was there.”
“My father was forcing a vote to remove me. I was trying to keep twelve thousand employees from waking up without leadership.”
“I was trying to tell you about two more people.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t ask.”
His face hardened in self-defense. “You could have told the receptionist why you were there.”
“I did. She called your executive floor. A man came down with an envelope and a warning.”
“What man?”
“I didn’t ask for his childhood photographs.”
“What warning?”
“That if I attempted to manufacture a personal claim against you, Drake counsel would respond aggressively.”
Griffin stepped back from the bed.
“My father?”
“The letter carried the company seal.”
“Do you still have it?”
Her laugh was quiet and without humor. “There he is.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I tell you I was frightened and alone, and you ask whether I preserved the evidence.”
“Because if someone used my company to threaten you—”
“Someone did use your company. You.”
“I never authorized—”
“You built a wall around yourself and hired people to decide who counted as real. You don’t get to stand on the safe side of it and call yourself innocent.”
A nurse opened the door and reminded them that Sloan needed rest.
Griffin lowered his voice. “I need to understand what happened.”
“No. You need to decide what happens now.”
“They’re my daughters.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Neither do you?”
Sloan’s eyes moved toward the dark window. “I was faithful to you.”
The answer sat between them, stripped of ceremony.
He swallowed.
“Then why say may be?”
“Because certainty belongs to tests, not memories. We’ll arrange one.”
“I can arrange it tonight.”
“You will arrange nothing tonight.”
“Sloan—”
“You don’t send a driver. You don’t send a physician from a private clinic. You don’t send a lawyer with a consent form. We choose an accredited laboratory together. The results come to both of us at the same time.”
He almost argued.
She saw him stop himself again.
“And until then,” she continued, “you do not tell anyone who they might be.”
“My security director knows something.”
“Your security director saw two frightened children.”
“My pilot heard the call.”
“Then perhaps, for once, the people who work for you can keep something private.”
The nurse stepped farther into the room.
Griffin picked up the broken paper clip Iris had given him. He had been holding it so tightly that it had left a red line across his palm.
“Can I see them tomorrow?”
“They’ll decide.”
“They’re eight.”
“They’ve been making decisions without you for eight years.”
He left before the nurse had to ask again.
Sloan remained in the hospital for two days. Griffin spent most of that time in the family waiting area, taking calls in a low voice and declining every suggestion that he relocate to a private suite. His presence became impossible to hide by the second morning.
A hospital employee photographed him asleep in a chair with Hazel’s cream ribbon looped around his wrist. Hazel had taken it from her hair when she complained it was too tight, then forgotten she had given it to him. The image appeared online before breakfast beneath a headline asking why Seattle’s most private billionaire was sleeping outside a cardiac unit.
By noon, a photographer waited across the street.
By evening, someone had found Sloan’s name.
Daniel entered the waiting room carrying a tablet and the expression of a man who preferred emergencies with guns.
“We have a problem.”
Griffin glanced at Hazel and Iris, who were playing a word game with a nurse. “Not here.”
They moved into the hall.
Daniel showed him the screen. An online financial site had published Sloan’s photograph, employment history, address, and several speculative paragraphs linking her small architecture firm to a Drake-funded redevelopment project.
“She isn’t working for us,” Griffin said.
“She submitted a competing proposal for the Rainier Commons property.”
Griffin read the article again.
Rainier Commons was a six-acre municipal site in South Seattle. Drake Urban had proposed luxury apartments with a public plaza and subsidized units sufficient to satisfy city requirements. Sloan’s firm had joined a nonprofit coalition proposing mixed-income housing, a childcare center, and a market for neighborhood vendors.
The city council vote was six weeks away.
“Who knew she was here?” Griffin asked.
“Hospital staff. Your flight crew. My team. The board knew you canceled dinner for a medical emergency.”
“My father?”
Daniel hesitated. “He asked why the Singapore meeting collapsed.”
“And?”
“I told him you had a personal matter.”
“You told Conrad Drake I had a personal matter and expected him not to turn it into a military campaign?”
“I did not tell him where you were.”
“He doesn’t require people to tell him things. He hires them to discover what wasn’t said.”
May you like
Daniel lowered the tablet. “There’s more.”
The photograph of Griffin asleep had been taken from inside the restricted unit. Hospital security was investigating, but the image had already been copied thousands of times. Comments had identified Hazel and Iris from a school fundraiser page before the school removed it.
