Thirty

They buried Augustine Harrow on the fifty-second day, in the rain, in the plot beside his son Richard on the hill behind Harrow House. The city sent its mayor. The company sent everyone above Manager. Reyes Capital sent a wreath the size of a car door, and Daniela Harrow, Manager of Communications, had it quietly moved to the far side of the chapel where it would not be in any photograph.

Daniel spoke for four minutes and did not cry, and then stood at the graveside until the last of the executive floor had filed past, shaking every hand, the Chief Executive Officer of Harrow Dynamics doing the job because there was no Chairman to do it. The board had met twice since the forty-fifth day and had not chosen one. It had named Daniel acting chair of its meetings, with a small a and a small c, and had agreed to decide nothing until the family had buried its dead.

Elena stood beside her husband with the Founder's Pen in her coat pocket, where it had been every day since the hallway. She had not yet signed anything with it. She did not know what the first thing should be.

Imogen stood on her mother's other side and looked at the grave and did not look at anyone.

On the sixtieth day, Imogen Harrow turned thirty.

There was no party. There was a board meeting at the Glass Tower at ten in the morning, called under the charter, at which Imogen Harrow, Vice President of Operations, was seated as a director of Harrow Dynamics for the first time in her life, in the chair her father had sat in and her grandfather before him. Daniel read the charter clause aloud because the charter required it. No Harrow before thirty. She was thirty. She sat.

The vote on the merger was thirty days away.

Afterwards Elena found her in the Operations wing, alone, with the door shut and the blinds half down, sitting at her desk with her coat still on.

"Vice President," Imogen said, without looking up. "Come to count my votes?"

"I came to tell you what Reyes offered you. So you don't have to."

That made her look up.

"He offered you the chair," Elena said. "Not this board. The merged company's. Chairman of Reyes Harrow, or Harrow Reyes, whatever he's calling it this week. Your brother out, you in, your name on the gate your grandfather kept you off for ten years. He came to Harrow House twice to say it, and he said it both times while your mother was out, because he knew she'd have thrown him in the river."

Imogen's jaw did the thing the Harrow jaw did. "You've been talking to the gatekeeper."

"Priya has been talking to the gatekeeper. I've been talking to Daniela, who talks to your mother, who talks to no one but Daniela. And I've been thinking about your face at the fountain." Elena sat down uninvited. "I was engaged to Julian Reyes for a year, Imogen. I know what it looks like when he offers someone exactly what they've wanted longest. He did it to me. He finds the thing you've been kept from and he holds it out, and the price is always the same. You stop being who you were."

For a long moment Imogen said nothing. Then she opened a drawer, took out an envelope, and put it on the desk between them. It was old and the flap was torn.

"He has a letter," she said. "From my father. Written the month before he died. I have never read it and Reyes has, and he told me what's in it, and I don't know if he's lying." Her voice was flat. "That is what he holds over me, Vice President. Not the chair. The chair was the sugar. I'm not going to tell you what he says is in the letter. Not today. But I am not going to vote for him either."

"Why not?"

"Because my grandfather died in a hallway with the proxy signed on the table, and my brother folded it and put it in his pocket over his heart, and I was standing in the doorway and neither of you saw me." She pushed the envelope back into the drawer. "I have hated Daniel since I was nineteen for sitting where I couldn't. I have hated you since the fourth day for walking in and being handed what I waited for. I am thirty years old today and I would like, for once, to be on the side of the family instead of against it. If you'll have me."

Elena looked at her. "I'm family by contract. Eleven months left."

"Then you have eleven months to make it worth my while." Imogen held out her hand across the desk. "Ally, Mrs Harrow. Not friend. I don't have the practice. Ally."

Elena took it. "Ally."

"Good. Then tell my brother his sister has a vote and she's keeping it in the family, and tell him if he ever folds a document over his heart in front of me again I'll have him checked for a pulse." Imogen stood and took her coat off at last. "And tell Daniela I'm sorry about the email thing. In writing. She'll want it in writing."

Elena found Daniel on the fortieth floor, in the long room, not in his grandfather's chair, which stood empty at the head of the table, but in his own, one place down.

"Your sister is with us," she said. "She's not going to tell me why yet. But she's with us."

Daniel closed his eyes for a second. "Then Class A votes as a block. With my mother's proxy and Imogen's seat we hold the family. Reyes can buy every Class B share on the market and he still loses by three to one." He opened them. "Thirty days. We're going to win this."

"Probably."

"Probably." He almost smiled. "You said probably to Priya, the first night. She told me. She said it was the most honest thing anyone had said in the building that week."

They sat for a while in the room where the old man had counted from seven o'clock. His assistant Oswin had left the Chairman's chair exactly as it was. Nobody had touched the gold pen's place on the table either, the little worn square in the wood where it had lain for sixty years. The board would have to fill the chair. Daniel would not take it, he had said so, a CEO could not be his own Chairman. Celeste would not, she had said so. Imogen was thirty years old that morning. And there was a Vice President who held a dead man's pen and no seat at all.

"Elena," Daniel said. "When the year is over."

"Don't."

"I have to. Grandfather said finish counting. I'm counting. In eleven months the contract ends and you walk out with a cheque, and Strategy keeps its Vice President, and I go back to sleeping in my office. That's the agreement. That's what we signed with that pen." He looked at her. "I would like to renegotiate it. I don't know the terms. I've never known the terms for this. But I would like to."

The question that had sat under everything since the terrace on the night of the wedding, the one neither of them had asked, was on the table now, between the empty chair and the worn square in the wood. When the contract ended, did she leave? Or had the contract, somewhere between the ruler and the hallway and the rain, stopped being the thing that held them?

Elena did not answer it. Instead she reached into her coat and took out the Founder's Pen and set it in its square on the table, where it fit exactly.

"Monday," she said. "Bring me a draft. Forty pages. I'll mark it up."

Then she leaned across the arm of the Chairman's empty chair and kissed her husband, which was not in the forty pages, and not in the charter, and not in any strategy she had written, and he kissed her back as if he had been waiting sixty days to be allowed in.

Downstairs Priya Sen updated the org chart. Chairman: vacant. Chief Executive Officer: Daniel Harrow. Vice President, Operations, and Director of the Board: Imogen Harrow. Vice President, Strategy: Elena Marsh Harrow. Manager, Communications: Daniela Harrow. Analyst, Strategy: Priya Sen.

In the comments field she typed: thirty days to the vote. Finance still has no Director. Someone should tell the Vice President her husband was looking for her, and someone should tell Reyes Capital the wreath was moved.

She saved it, and turned off her monitors, and went home.