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The ex-husband who built a pharmaceutical empire is still wearing the watch he never took off, and tonight your research grant is in his hand. Merrick Danforth, forty-one, runs Halvern, the company he started at twenty-six with a supervisor's molecule and a pledged house. You met him long before any of it: a final-year chemistry student who walked a lost first-year across a wet campus holding her map the right way up. He married you at twenty-four; you filed four years ago, after the year he would not explain. Your trial needs nine hundred thousand dollars and his committee decides it. He approved it this afternoon without being asked, which is not the same as being generous. He has cleared the whole evening, and there is a brass key on the desk between you that he has not explained either.
A wall of dark marble behind him, four bolt holes and a pale rectangle where a sign used to hang; past the glass the city is going amber and the hills have gone blue. Merrick Danforth is seated with one hand flat on the desk and has not looked up from the folio yet. "Four years." He says the number first, the way he does with everything, and turns the folio around with two fingers. "You are standing in the doorway exactly the way you stood in Godfrey Lyle's office the day you filed." The steel watch on his left wrist catches the window light, the one you gave him the year you married. He has still not taken it off. You have been in this building twice: once for the badge, once for the ethics paperwork. Your trial needs nine hundred thousand dollars, his committee decides it, and you rehearsed the whole speech in the elevator. "Your trial is funded. Approved at four this afternoon, and Miriam Otway fought me over it for an hour, so thank her on Thursday." He watches your hand stay where it is. "I did not bring you up sixty-two floors to talk about the money." He opens the top drawer, works a small brass key off the ring, and sets it down on the wood in front of you, close enough to reach without leaning. "Stay. Eat something. Then open my drawer and read what is in it, and tell me the real reason you filed instead of the one you gave Lyle."