Chapter 2: The Ride Into the City
The sedan was warm enough that my hands started aching as they thawed.
Richard sat across from me, his overcoat folded over one arm. Beyond the window, the cemetery gates slipped out of sight. I didn’t turn to watch them disappear. My phone rested in my coat pocket, silent.
Richard glanced at me.
“Have you answered either of them?”
“No.”
“Do you intend to?”
“Not while I’m angry.”
He nodded once, as if that answer mattered more than the anger itself.
The driver eased us onto the highway. For a while, neither of us spoke. The tires hissed over wet pavement, and the bare trees along the roadside blurred into gray streaks. I tried to think about the city ahead, but my mind kept returning to the empty place on the seat beside me where Eleanor used to sit.
Richard opened his briefcase, then closed it again without taking anything out.
“You asked me to prepare the documents we discussed,” he said. “I can do that. But I need to know what you want them to accomplish.”
“I want to be certain my decisions are mine.”
“That’s not the same as telling me what decision to make.”
“No. It isn’t.”
His eyes stayed on mine. He had spent enough years across a table from me to know when I was trying to make a hard thing sound simple.
“Harold, I’m going to ask you something, and I’d rather you not answer too quickly.”
“Go ahead.”
“Are you trying to protect what you built—or punish your daughter?”
The question landed harder than I expected. I looked out at the road. A truck passed us, its trailer rattling in the wind.
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
“That’s honest.”
“I know what I don’t want. I don’t want my grief used as proof that I can’t think. I don’t want anyone deciding what happens to my home or my company because I’m seventy-one and had a bad day.”
“That’s a principle,” Richard said. “Punishment would be making a decision because you want them to hurt.”
I looked back at him.
“You think I’d do that?”
“I think you’ve been hurt. I’d be doing you no favors if I pretended that couldn’t cloud your judgment.”
The driver’s hands remained steady on the wheel. Outside, a red taillight winked through the mist and vanished around a bend.
“I don’t want to hurt Vanessa,” I said.
“Then don’t build your plan around hurting her.”
“And if she’s already helping Derek take something from me?”
Richard didn’t answer at once.
“Then we find out what has actually happened before we decide what to do about it.”
He said it without softness, but not without care. That was one thing I had always respected about him. He never confused comfort with help.
For the next hour, we spoke mostly about ordinary things: the road, the rain, the old warehouse district where the company had started with two borrowed trucks. Richard remembered the first time he’d visited our office, a drafty room above a tire shop where Eleanor had kept the books.
“She knew every invoice by sight,” he said.
“She knew when I was wrong before I did.”
“That sounds familiar.”
A laugh escaped me, brief and surprised. Then it was gone. I rubbed my thumb across the seam of my coat and let the quiet settle again.
Richard’s phone rang. He checked the screen, then declined the call.
“Something wrong?”
“Not yet.”
He set the phone facedown.
We were three hours into the drive when he finally said, “There’s a board meeting in four days.”
I turned from the window.
“What board meeting?”
“The regular meeting. Derek expects to be considered for a promotion.”
The word promotion seemed too small for the space it opened inside me. Derek had never mentioned it to my face. I pictured him walking into the room in his best suit, greeting directors as if the decision had already been made. I wondered how long he’d been preparing for it.
“What position?”
“Senior leadership. I don’t want to get ahead of what’s been formally presented.”
“Has anything been formally presented?”
“I’m checking.”
“You know enough to tell me he expects the promotion.”
“I do.”
The sedan hummed beneath us. I folded my hands together to keep them still.
“Is my name on the agenda?”
“I haven’t seen the final packet.”
I felt the first sharp pull of anger—not the hot, helpless kind from the cemetery, but something colder. Something that wanted a target.
Richard noticed.
“Don’t decide what this means until we know what it means,” he said.
“You’re very determined to keep me reasonable.”
“I’m determined to keep you in control of your own choices.”
I leaned back. The leather smelled faintly of rain and polish.
“You’ve spent the last hour warning me away from the wrong kind of decision.”
“I have.”
“And you haven’t told me what I should do.”
“That’s because it’s your company, Harold.”
The road narrowed as we entered the city. Buildings rose behind the veil of drizzle, familiar shapes dulled by the weather. My chest tightened at the sight of the old brick warehouse district. Eleanor and I had once walked those streets after midnight, too tired to celebrate properly when our first major contract came through. She’d bought us coffee from a vending machine and told me not to get used to the easy years.
I had not.
When the sedan pulled up at my house, Richard got out with me. The porch light was on, though I hadn’t remembered leaving it that way. Inside, the rooms were exactly as I’d left them: Eleanor’s blue mug beside the sink, her gardening gloves on the mudroom shelf. The quiet met us at the door.
I took off my coat and hung it up.
“Before you prepare anything that could affect the company,” I said, “I want you to examine the actual governance. The bylaws, the board’s authority, my authority. Everything that’s in force—not what anyone assumes is in force.”
Richard set his briefcase on the dining table.
“That’s the right place to start.”
“I’m not asking you to write me a weapon.”
“Good.”
“I’m asking you to tell me what’s true.”
“I can do that.”
He opened his case. I watched him take out a yellow legal pad and a pen. No grand declaration. No promise to destroy Derek. Just a blank sheet waiting for facts.
Then Richard paused.
“There’s one thing I should tell you before I start.”
I stayed by the table.
“What?”
“I can’t say yet what Derek has told the directors. But he may already be telling them you intend to step aside.”
The room seemed to contract around us.
May you like
I looked at the blank page between us.
“Then find out,” I said. “Before anyone mistakes my silence for consent.”
