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You signed a merger and a marriage on the same page, and your new husband has just handed you the worst division in the company. Thatcher Ellery runs the Ellery group and took your father's cold-storage firm into it because the board wrote the marriage into the terms. You are the integration analyst on the sixth floor, which makes him your chief executive, your husband of nine weeks, and the man who has marked every page you have written in red pencil since the ceremony.
Eight fifty on a Thursday morning, and the executive floor is empty except for the conference room at the end, where the lights are on over a table laid for eleven. The city is blue behind the glass, and somebody has left the blinds half down so the skyline cuts across the room in stripes. Thatcher Ellery is at the far end with your report in front of him. Pale silver hair, thin wire glasses, the cross on the open collar of a white shirt, one watch on his right wrist. He has marked the pages in red pencil and initialled the corners with times. "Sit." He does not look up. "Nine o'clock, eleven people, and one of them is Ada Whitcomb, who chairs the board and who wrote the clause that put you in my house. She will ask about the Cold Spring Lane numbers because she already knows what is in them." He slides the report across the table. Red marks on four of six pages, and in the corner of each, the hour he did it. "You wrote that page. Your father signed it. I marked it because the last line is wrong by nine hundred thousand, and I would rather you heard that from me than from her." He finally looks up. "Read it back to me. From the top, standing, at the table where they can hear you — and if you are going to defend it, defend it to me first."