Twenty Minutes In The Green Room

I sat down opposite my husband and closed the door myself.

It was Thursday, eleven in the morning, and the green room behind the Market Hall stage smelled of hairspray and rehearsal coffee. Dominic was in shirtsleeves, running his remarks on a phone propped against a mirror. He gave me a look that said I had exactly twenty minutes of his time.

"I saw something on your tablet," I said. "A waiver. A new class of shares."

He didn't flinch. That was the professional in him.

"You went through my tablet."

"It was on the counter."

"It's a restructuring instrument, Leona. Confidential. Curtis Lindqvist has reviewed every line." He reached for his water. "The buyer is a long-term capital partner. It's the kind of thing you'd find boring."

"Beaumont Harbor Partners isn't a capital partner. It's an LLC nine days old, and Sloane Beaumont owns most of it."

"Sloane is a consultant."

"Sloane has had lunch with you every Friday since April."

That landed. Something crossed his face, quick and small, and then he laughed.

"Business lunches," he said. "It's called having a job."

"Fourteen of them. Always the same restaurant."

"You count lunches now?" He stood, buttoning his cuffs. "You've been strange for months. Distant. I've been patient."

"My signature is on that waiver."

"Then you signed it."

"I didn't. It says Marchetti-Tarrant."

For a moment the only sound was the phone, still playing his own voice thanking the people who built this company.

Dominic switched it off.

"I don't know what you think you've found," he said, in the flat voice that had always frightened junior staff, "but I'd be careful. You haven't held a position at this company in thirteen years, and you have no office here. If I'm honest, you're my guest."

There it was. Not a lie about the paper. A lie about me.

"Your guest," I said.

"Tonight matters. Two hundred people, the mayor, the press. I won't have it turned into a family argument." He lifted the intercom. "Hollis, would you come to the green room? Ms. Marchetti is leaving."

Hollis arrived in thirty seconds. He was a big man in a grey blazer who had once carried my father's coat up these very stairs when this was still a warehouse.

"Ma'am," he said, miserable.

I stood. Dominic didn't.

"Your badge, please," Hollis said.

I handed it over. He held it against the reader by the door out of habit, and the light flashed red.

It had been deactivated already.

Dominic had cancelled it before I ever walked in.

"Hollis will see you out," my husband said, and picked his phone back up.