His face tightening as the call connected. Down in the lobby, Blaine was still speaking to the officers when his phone buzzed against his hip. He answered without looking at the screen. His attention split between the woman in front of him and the growing audience of employees who had stopped pretending not to watch. Celeste's voice came through sharp and fast asking where Amara Whitlock currently was.
Blaine glanced toward the reception desk, told her the woman was downstairs, that they were, in his words, handling the situation. Celeste's voice dropped into a register he had rarely heard from her, low and controlled in the way that always something serious, and she asked him precisely what he meant by handling it. Blaine, still convinced he was in the right, told her he was protecting the company from an unauthorized visitor. There was a pause on the line so long that he actually pulled the phone away from his ear to check the call had not dropped. And when Celeste spoke again, her voice had risen into something close to a shout, ordering him not to let that woman leave the building under any circumstances.
Blaine felt the ground shift beneath him for the first time that morning, though he still did not fully understand why. Celeste turned to the other directors still seated at the table, her hand still gripping the phone, and told them plainly that if Amara Whitlock walked out of that building, the company would lose $350 million along with any hope of the restructuring deal that had been months in the making. One director shot up out of his chair so fast it rolled backward into the wall. Another simply said no, twice, as though repeating the word might undo whatever had already happened downstairs. Celeste did not wait for further discussion.
She told them they were going down there themselves, and the room emptied in a matter of seconds. The boardroom doors flew open with enough force to bang against the wall, and Celeste led three directors down the hallway at a pace none of them had seen from her in years. In the elevator, nobody spoke. Each of them stared at the floor numbers ticking downward, running through every possible version of what they might find when the doors opened, and none of the versions they imagined were good. Back in the lobby, Blaine was still trying to convince the officers that the situation was under control, that this woman had no legitimate business inside the building.
He told her flatly that he did not know who she was, and Amara answered simply that this was correct. He did not. He asked her, with a note of triumph creeping into his voice, why she was still standing there if she had no real reason to be. Amara told him she was there to sign an agreement. Blaine laughed, a short, disbelieving sound, and asked if she really expected him to believe that.