My husband sent soup to my office for our anniversary and told his assistant to make sure I finished every drop. Before I tasted it, my mother-in-law took the thermos and ate from it in front of twelve employees. Ten minutes later, she collapsed...

The boardroom on the third floor of Harlow Shipping was lined with heart-pine paneling that Derek’s grandfather had salvaged from a cotton warehouse in Brunswick. On the north wall, an oil portrait of the founder looked down on twelve men and two women who sat around a mahogany table that had been cleared of everything except legal pads, water carafes, and thick three-ring binders bound in black vinyl.

I sat at the head of the table.

Not because I had been elected by the shareholders, but because the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia had issued an emergency order designating Renee Callahan, CPA, CFE, as the special master in equity for the Harlow Maritime Group.

Constance Harlow sat at the far end of the room.

She was in a wheelchair, her legs covered by a heavy cashmere throw that Derek had bought her in Edinburgh two winters ago. Her face was the color of skim milk, the skin around her eyes loose and bruised-looking, her hands trembling with a fine, rhythmic tremor that she tried to disguise by keeping her fingers tucked into the fringe of the blanket.

Her pearls were gone. Around her neck, she wore a high-collared silk blouse that concealed the red, angry track where the emergency tracheotomy tube had been inserted six days earlier.

Beside her sat an attorney she had hired herself—a sharp-featured woman from Atlanta named Eleanor Vance, Arthur’s estranged niece, who had spent the last twenty years building a practice on the wreckage of old coastal estates.

"The federal government has agreed to stay the asset forfeiture proceedings against the core terminal operations," I said, my voice carrying cleanly through the long room without the aid of a microphone. "On two conditions."

The board members shifted in their leather armchairs. Old man Calloway, who had owned twenty percent of the preferred stock since the Carter administration, cleared his throat with a wet, gravelly rattle.

"What conditions, Renee?"

"First," I said, "the immediate liquidation of DH Holdings and the transfer of all recovered foreign balances—currently estimated at three point two million dollars—to an escrow account overseen by the EPA to cover the environmental remediation costs at terminal four."

"That leaves the operating company with less than six weeks of payroll reserves," Calloway muttered.

"It leaves the operating company alive," I said, looking him directly in the eye until he dropped his gaze to his water glass. "The alternative, Mr. Calloway, is that the Department of Justice files a RICO indictment against the board of directors for criminal negligence in the supervision of hazardous materials shipments. I have the draft complaint here. Agent Davis was kind enough to provide a courtesy copy before he left for the federal courthouse."

I tapped the black binder in front of me. Nobody asked to see the complaint.

"And the second condition?" Eleanor Vance asked from behind Constance’s wheelchair.

"The second condition," I said, turning my gaze to Constance, "is the immediate surrender of all voting proxies held by the Harlow family trust."

Constance’s chin jerked upward. For a moment, the old Constance—the woman who had spent forty years deciding which daughters of which cotton brokers were allowed into the Telfair ball—flashed behind her clouded gray eyes.

"This company bears my husband’s name," she whispered. Her voice was cracked, a dry reed scraping against gravel. "My son made... mistakes. Derek was under extraordinary pressure. The banks—"

"Your son tried to kill me, Constance."

The room went dead silent. Even the air conditioning seemed to drop into an idle hum.

"He tried to kill you," Constance said, her fingers clawing at the fringe of the cashmere throw. "And instead, he nearly killed his own mother. Do you think I don't know that? Do you think I haven't spent six days in the dark with a tube down my throat, knowing that the boy I carried, the boy I gave this company to, looked at a bottle of poison and thought of his balance sheet?"

A single tear—thick, greasy with the antibiotic ointment they were still putting into her inflamed tear ducts—rolled down her hollow cheek and caught in the corner of her mouth.

"He didn't care about you, Renee," she rasped. "And he didn't care about me. He cared about the cranes. He cared about the slips. He cared about being Derek Harlow on the verandah at the Yacht Club."

She reached out with a trembling hand, took the silver Montblanc pen her lawyer laid before her, and pulled the proxy agreement across her lap.

Her signature was not the firm, aristocratic script that had graced thirty years of museum gala programs. It was a jagged, spidery crawl, the letters breaking and staggering across the line like the footprints of an injured bird.

When she finished, she dropped the pen. It rolled off the mahogany table and fell onto the carpet with a soft, dull thud.

"Take me out of here, Eleanor," she said without looking up. "I don't want to see the river."

The lawyer wheeled her toward the double doors. As the chair reached the threshold, Constance raised one hand—not to stop the chair, but to hold it there for three seconds.

She didn't turn around.

"The baby," she said, her back to the room.

I didn't answer.

"Is it Derek’s?"

"The baby is mine, Constance," I said. "Everything else in this room belonged to him. But the child is mine."

Constance was silent for five seconds. Her shoulders, hunched beneath the high-collared silk blouse, rose and fell with a long, shuddering breath that sounded like dry leaves scraping over concrete.