You have 400 employees. He said it evenly. You're not just a company in Denver. " The silence in the garage was different from their other silences. This one had weight. "What else? " he said.
"I'm the company is worth a significant amount. " I should have been clearer about what that How much? She looked at him directly. She owed him that. At last estimate, between 40 and 60 million, depending on the round. He stood very still.
"I wasn't lying to you," she said. "I just didn't I was so tired of being seen as that. " "I came here and you didn't ask, and it was the first time in years someone didn't. I don't care about the money. " His voice was flat, not cold, but controlled. "I care that I've been talking to you for three weeks and I didn't know who I was talking to. You did. " "You were.
Riley, you know me better than most people who've known me for years. " She felt the sting in her own voice and didn't try to hide it. "You know how I take my coffee. You know I can't braid hair correctly, no matter how many times Sophie tries to teach me. You know I built the south wall too high, and you didn't say anything because you knew Sophie liked it. " "You knew. " "I need to think," he said quietly, definitively. She nodded.
She picked up her jacket from the hook by the door. She walked to the Triumph. She rode out of the lot and on to the highway, and she didn't let herself look in the mirror. She took a room at the Hotel Jerome. She flew to Chicago.
She sat across a mahogany table from three men who collectively controlled a significant portion of her company's future, and she was, as she always was in these rooms, composed and precise and entirely in command of every variable except the ones that mattered. Noah told her afterward that she'd been brilliant. She looked at him and felt absolutely nothing. She flew back to Denver. She sat in her apartment and watched the city below her window, the lights, the grid, the orderly geometry of a place that made sense on paper.
Her phone showed three unanswered calls from Sophie's school number. Then, she remembered that Sophie's school didn't have her number. She looked more carefully. The calls were from a number she didn't recognize, Aspen area code. She called back.
The voice that answered was Daniel's, but wrong, tight, and rough in a way she'd never heard it. "Sophie fell," he said, "on the ice behind the garage, head injury. They're A" breath. "They're keeping her overnight. They want to do more imaging tomorrow. " She drove.
Four hours in the dark, snow falling again on the passes, white knuckles on the wheel. She didn't think. She didn't plan. She just drove. Aspen Valley Hospital was small and quiet at 2:00 in the morning.