The Yellow Tab

A yellow sticky tab is what started it, two days earlier, on Tuesday morning.

I was looking for the charger, not for a secret. Dominic had left his tablet on the kitchen island, screen still awake, and a message from a number saved as "S" sat across the top.

L's signature page is done. She never reads her mail.

Three readings. On the first I assumed it was about a birthday card. By the second, I had remembered that no signature page of mine existed for anything this month. On the third, I put my finger on the glass and scrolled up.

He had been careless. Dominic never used to be careless, but he had been running the company on applause for fourteen years, and applause makes a person believe nobody checks.

Above the note was a photo of a document, taken flat on a desk. A stack of white pages, thin, the top one headed with the words Consent to Amend the Voting Agreement. On the last page a bright yellow tab stuck out from the edge, exactly where a signature would go.

Under the tab, a line. Under the line, a name.

Mine.

I had never seen that page. I had never been asked to sign it. And I knew what it was, because my father made me learn the voting agreement when I was twenty-two, at his kitchen table, with a pencil.

That agreement existed so nobody could dilute the votes of the holding company. Only its trustee could consent to a change. I was the trustee.

I scrolled further. A draft resolution. Twenty million Class B shares, ten votes each. A buyer named Beaumont Harbor Partners LLC.

I said the name out loud in the empty kitchen.

Sloane's last name.

I set the tablet exactly where he had left it, at exactly the angle he had left it. Then I took a photo of the screen with my own phone, three times, in case one blurred.

My hands were steady. That was the strange part. I had spent all spring learning how to sit still while my marriage came apart, and it turned out stillness was a skill that transferred.

I made coffee. I drank it standing up.

At 8:40 that morning Dominic came in whistling, kissed the air near my cheek, and asked whether I had plans for the gala.

"I'll be there," I said.

"Wear the grey," he said. "It photographs well."

He took the tablet, glanced at it, and put it in his bag.

I waited until the elevator doors had closed behind him. Then I called the number my father's old lawyer had made me memorize, and asked him how long it would take to freeze a proxy.

"Depends on who's asking," he said.

"The trustee."

He was quiet a moment. "Then it takes a signature and about a day."

I looked at the tab on my phone screen, zoomed in until the yellow filled everything.

Someone had already signed my name under it.