The Board Meeting

Nora spent the two weeks between Cal’s office and the board meeting more disciplined than she’d been in her entire career, because discipline was the only thing keeping the arrangement from collapsing under its own weight. She’d insisted on outside counsel within two days of hearing his explanation — a firm with no history with either of them — and sat through three separate calls making sure the Alcazar debt was documented properly before she let herself believe a word of what Cal had told her. Lena Whitfield’s audit committee had received a full accounting of it in closed session the previous Friday: the debt’s origin, the family’s claim, a formal settlement structure that finally put a real contract underneath thirty years of quiet wire transfers. It wasn’t clean. It was, at least, no longer hidden from the people whose job it was to know.

The rest of the board…