“The card is right here,” Irene said. “Nobody has read it yet.”
Dennis reached for it.
He was actually reaching for it.
That was the moment Candace decided the situation needed to move faster.
She stepped between them, snatched the leather folder from Irene’s lap, and held it high.
“Let’s see what’s really in here,” she announced. “Since we’re doing show-and-tell.”
“Give that back.”
Irene’s voice changed.
Low.
Flat.
The voice of a woman halfway out of patience.
Candace shook the folder upside down.
Papers burst loose and scattered across the marble like startled birds.
Pages skidded beneath the sofas.
A pen rolled against Dennis’s boot.
The lobby went very quiet.
One page came to rest faceup in the middle of the floor.
Heavy cream paper.
Embossed letterhead.
Across the top, in bold type, it read:
Meridian Capital
Share Transfer Agreement
Confidential
Nobody read it.
Nobody ever reads the most important thing in the room.
The man in the camel coat, the same one who had stepped over Irene’s wheel outside, wandered past the page on the way toward the elevators.
He glanced down at the word Confidential, looked at his phone, and kept walking.
Some people are extras in every story they enter.
Candace tossed the empty folder onto the counter.
“Junk mail and printouts. Like I said.”
Irene looked at her papers spread across sixty feet of marble.
Ten years of deals had taught her that rage was a currency.
Spend it wrong and you lose everything.
So she placed her hands on her wheels and began collecting the documents one by one.
She had to lean far over the side of her chair for each page.
Reach.
Strain.
Grip.
Her shoulders, already burning from moving the sign at the ramp, screamed with every stretch.
She kept her face smooth.
She had stopped letting strangers watch her hurt a long time ago.
Every dip of her body was visible to forty people.
Not one of them moved.
Except Tasha.
The barista crossed the lobby in seconds and dropped to her knees, gathering pages.
Candace’s voice struck her like a thrown glass.
“Touch one page and you’re fired today. I’ll write it up as assisting a trespasser.”
Tasha froze.
Two sheets in her hand.
Nineteen credit hours from finishing her degree.
Rent due Friday.
She looked at Irene.
“It’s all right,” Irene said softly. “Put them down.”
Tasha placed the pages where Irene could reach them.
Then, still kneeling with her back toward the desk, she whispered, “I texted Lauren, Mr. Brennan’s assistant.”
“She buys a chai from me every morning at 9:00. She always answers.”
Irene’s hands paused on the wheels for a single breath.
“Then we wait,” she whispered back. “Go protect your job. You’ve done plenty.”
Candace watched from behind the counter, arms crossed, narrating for her audience.
“You see this? This performance?”
“They do this.”
“They make a scene, then they call a lawyer.”
“I’ve seen it a hundred times.”