"You said I never earned anything. You said I should know my place." He tucked the leather folder under his arm. "Tell me, Ethan, where exactly is my place?"
Ethan's mouth opened, closed. "I'll wait," Travis said. Vanessa recovered first because Vanessa had always been the one who recovered first. She put a hand on her husband's arm and turned on the smile she used for waiters and valets and anyone she decided she needed something from.
"Mr. Reed," she said, and her voice came out sweet as syrup. "This is all just a terrible misunderstanding. We had no idea who you were. If we'd known—"
"If you'd known I owned the place, you'd have been nice to me." Travis nodded slowly. "Yeah, I figured that's how it works in your world." He looked at her with those calm gray eyes.
"That's the whole problem, sweetheart. You only know how to be kind to people you're scared of." Vanessa's smile flickered. "You weren't kind to me 10 minutes ago," Travis went on.
"Because 10 minutes ago you thought I was nobody. And here's the thing about people like you. You'll never understand this, but I'll say it anyway. The way a person treats a nobody is the only honest thing about them."
"Everything else is performance." He glanced at the crowd. "You two have been performing your whole lives. I just happened to be the audience that didn't clap."
A few people in the crowd shifted. One woman near the fountain looked down at her own glass like she'd suddenly remembered something she'd said earlier. Gerald Pruitt found his voice then, though it came out strangled. "Mr. Reed, I... sir, I had no way of knowing."
"The protocol for unrecognized guests is... I was just following procedure. I was doing my job." "You were doing your job," Travis repeated. "Yes, sir."
"Your job was to call the police and have an old man's motorcycle impounded because a rich customer didn't like the look of him." Travis let that sit in the air for a second. "Is that the job? Because if that's the job, Gerald, then I've got some real questions about who's been training my staff."
The blood drained out of Pruitt's face. "My staff." The word landed on him like a brick. He'd spent six years believing the owners were a faceless holding company in a tower, and now the holding company was standing three feet away in cracked boots.
The holding company had just watched Gerald Pruitt try to throw it off its own property. "I want to be clear," Pruitt said quickly, desperately. "I never said anything personally insulting to you, sir. I was professional the entire time."
"It was these two who—" "You hid behind them," Travis said. "That's worse." Pruitt shut his mouth.