PART 2
The car smelled of leather and rain.
Flynn Harlan handed me a first-aid kit from under the seat before he said a single word, and then he faced forward and let me shake in peace, which I have since learned is the most expensive kind of courtesy there is.
I wrapped my palm.
I watched the gates of my father’s estate shrink in the rear window, two flashlight beams stranded at the fence line like fireflies in the rain.
“You know who I am,” he said finally.
“You bought our debt this morning. A hundred and sixty million of it. The finance department noticed, Mr. Harlan. I am the finance department.”
Something that wasn’t quite a smile crossed his face.
“And you’re the daughter.”
“I’m the eighteen percent.”
“No,” he said, looking at me fully for the first time.
“You’re the reason I bought the debt.”
The heater hummed.
My cut palm throbbed inside the gauze.
“Explain that.”
“Everett Sterling paid for my education,” Flynn said.
“Thirty-one years ago, he caught a warehouse kid reading freight manifests on breaks and decided that was worth a college tuition.
I owe your father the entire shape of my life.
Eight months ago, before he passed, he wrote me a letter.
Two sentences.
‘Keep an eye on the market around Sterling Global.
If my daughter ever stands in the road, stop the car.'”
I stared at him.
“He did not write that.”
Flynn reached into his coat and handed me an envelope, soft at the corners from being carried.
My father’s handwriting.
My father’s exact humor — even the little slash he put through his sevens, the one I put through mine because I learned my numbers at his elbow.
I read it four times and then I looked out the window and let the rain have my face for a while, and Flynn Harlan studied his phone and pretended not to notice, which was the second expensive courtesy.
For eight months I had believed my father left me nothing but eighteen percent and a cubicle.
He had left a sentinel on the road instead, and never told me, because telling me would have made me wait for rescue instead of building my own.
“He knew,” I said finally.
“He suspected. He was sick, not blind.
When the numbers started bending last year, I started buying the debt quietly.
Tonight I was driving out to deliver the acquisition notice in person.
Then a barefoot woman jumped in front of my car.”
He glanced at my feet.
“I assume you’re the auditor Wendy should have fired first.”
“I’m the stepdaughter she tried to s*ll at dinner.”
The car went very quiet.
“Say that again,” Flynn said, and his voice had changed registers entirely.
So I told him.
The champagne, poured by the same staff who used to sneak me cookies.
Luca Vance.
Marriage eventually, exclusivity immediately.
The cold rings closing around my wrist.
The voting pool, the locked doors, the two men by the exit who moved when I stood.
I told it flatly, the way I read numbers aloud, because if I let one crack into my voice the whole night would come through it.
By the end of it, Flynn Harlan was looking out his window at the storm the way men look at something they are deciding how completely to take apart.
“And the file,” I finished, “releases to regulators at midnight unless I stop it.
Six weeks of evidence.
Shell consultants, her brother Gordon’s accounts, f*rged authorizations, all of it.”
He turned back to me.
“What time is it now?”
I looked at the dashboard.
9:41.
“Miss Sterling,” Flynn said, “you have two hours and nineteen minutes to make the most important decision of your life, and I’d like to buy you a sandwich while you make it.”
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