Wake

"I need time," Weston told Voss, which wasn't a lie so much as the truest thing he could afford to say, and Voss, to his credit, only nodded and said the thirty days ran both ways.

He should have left the estate that afternoon. Instead his mother asked him to stay for the family dinner — extended Calders flown in from three continents, place cards, the good china — and some part of him that still wanted, after everything, to belong to this table said yes.

It went well for exactly eleven minutes.

"So," Sterling said, swirling wine he hadn't earned the taste for until he was thirty, loud enough to still the table, "are we going to talk about why the black sheep suddenly can't stop lurking around Voss's office?"

"I was in the library."

"You were cozying up to the one man who controls whether I inherit anything from this family, right after a mystery clause drops into Dad's will conveniently naming an untraceable savior. Convenient, don't you think, that you showed up the same week?"

"I came for the funeral, Sterling."

"You came for the money. You always come for the money, eventually — you just usually have the decency to wait until we're not looking."

"That's enough," Rosalind said, but Sterling was standing now, chair scraping back, years of resentment finally finding a room full of witnesses.

"He let you back into this house after everything you did, and within a week you're circling the one clause worth six million dollars. You want to explain that, or should we just call it what it is?"

Weston stood too, hands flat on the tablecloth, throat tight around eleven years of things he'd promised himself he'd never say in this dining room. He opened his mouth — and his phone buzzed against his hip, insistent, twice, three times, the ringtone he'd set only for the Meridian dispatch line.

He didn't want to look. He looked anyway.

Three missed calls. One text, all capitals: CALL ME NOW — SOMEONE'S ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WIRE ACCOUNT.