Rooftop

By the second bottle of wine, even Desmond had stopped touching his tie every few minutes, which Nora privately counted as the evening’s real achievement — a small miracle for a man wedged into the private back room Desmond had picked for the celebration dinner, one that smelled like garlic and good bread and felt, for once, like a place nobody was being evaluated in. Dara had flown in for it, unofficially, on the thin pretext of a client check-in that both of them knew was mostly an excuse to see the man in person before she committed to a final opinion of him.

“To Southline, may it rot,” Desmond said, raising his glass, “and to the CFO’s office finally getting to say yes to something instead of apologizing for a no.”

“To the numbers holding,” Cal said, “which they wouldn’t have, without the person sitting across from me refusing…