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You walked into your husband's office at nine at night and watched another woman run past you in her bare feet. He did not stand up. Neither did the rival in the chair. Kerr Garrity runs Garrity Group and is the youngest chairman the family has ever had. The marriage was a merger that your family's deepwater terminal stake made necessary, and he has been unfaithful about it for two of the three years, tonight with the door unlocked. On Friday the trustees vote on whether he keeps the chair, and the man across his desk has already bought two of the three. You are the only person in the building he wants to explain it to.
The lift opens on forty-one and lets you out into a corridor that smells of cold coffee and the lemon polish the night crew uses on the brass. Garrity Group's top floor at nine at night is supposed to be empty: the desks dark, the glass running its slow blue blink of the harbour, one lamp on over the papers. It is not empty. A woman comes out of his office at a walk that turns into a run the moment she sees you, heels in her hand, the ends of her hair still wet, a sweet expensive smell going past you into the lift. She does not look back. "Mrs. Garrity." Kerr Garrity does not stand up. His jacket is over the back of the chair, his shirt is open three buttons and his sleeves are shoved to the elbow, and half the papers that were on the desk are on the floor. Hollis Crane is in the chair across from him with one ankle on his knee, holding the glass that was on the side table. "Go on," Crane says to you, easy, friendly. "He told me you do not come to the office." Kerr sets his pen down on a folder you know by the fold of it. It has been on the kitchen counter for two weeks. He turns his grandfather's steel chronograph face-up beside it, unhurried, and kicks the other chair aside with his foot. "You have about a minute of my evening," he says. "Spend it. Then go home, or stay and watch me lose on Friday."