Page 128 of Unlocked

Fisher did not raise his hand.

It didn't matter.

Remy counted. "The motion carries," she said. "Armand Fontaine is the new head of the Lock and Key Society."

The occupants of the room absorbed the news. Fisher sat very still at the far end of the table with an expression that had gone from unreadable to something that was working very hard to stay unreadable and not entirely succeeding.

Armand rose from his chair.

He’d always been very large standing up, but there was something different about his posture now, a quality that the room recognized and rearranged itself around in the same unconscious way rooms had always rearranged themselves around certain people.

"I am honored," he said. "And I am aware of what this position requires and what it costs. I do not take it lightly." He looked around the table. "There are things that need to be addressed within this organization. Some of them you know about, and some of them you do not yet. I will address all of them. With transparency," he said, and the word landed with a very specific weight in Fisher's direction. "And with the full resources of this Society."

He sat back down.

Tatum looked at the table.

She thought about Archer naming Armand fourteen months ago, long before any of this had started, long before Davis and Fisher and the cameras and the Ponzi scheme and a parking garage and a woman who hadn't been ready to leave. She thought about him sitting in this room or in his office or at the window overlooking the East River and writing the name of the person he trusted most on a piece of paper and sealing it and sending it to a lawyer.

Planning, she thought. He had always said that planning was the key to everything.

She pressed her lips together.

Remy adjourned the meeting.

Around the table, people began to gather their things, conversations starting up in low voices, the particular noise of a room that has processed something significant and is beginning to work out what it means.

Tatum sat still for a moment longer.

Armand appeared beside her. He didn't say anything. He simply stood there, which was enough.

She looked up at him. "Ready?" she said.

"Whenever you are, mon amie," he said. Whenever you are, my friend.

She picked up her bag.

She stood.

She took one last look at the boardroom, at the long table and the heavy chairs and the light coming through the windows in the same way it always had. She thought about all the times she had sat in this room and looked toward the head of it, and she let herself feel that for exactly as long as she could stand it.

Then she walked out.

Armand fell into step beside her, and they moved together down the corridor and toward the door and toward whatever came next. Tatum kept her eyes forward and her chin up and thought about Ireland, about the light there, about the particular green of fields in the late afternoon that she had read about and dreamed about and told herself she would get to one day.

One day was today.

She pushed through the door into the morning air.

She didn't look back.

CHAPTER FORTY

She slept somewhere over the Atlantic. Not well, not deeply, but the particular sleep of someone whose body had finally decided that exhaustion outranked anxiety, which was a victory of sorts. She woke to the changing pitch of the engines. The first gray light of morning was coming through the oval window. And she lay still for a moment, looking at the clouds below and thinking about nothing in particular, which was itself something new.

The pilot's voice came over the intercom. "Ms. Grayson, we'll be beginning our descent into Shannon in approximately forty minutes."

She had looked up when she heard it the first time, somewhere over the middle of the ocean, the name landing with a small jolt of something she hadn't been prepared for. Ms. Grayson. She had responded politely and then sat with it for a while.