And to do that I had to be in the room in Seattle where it would be signed.

I was not fleeing my husband.

I was flying toward the one place I could shut the whole thing down.

As I reached the private terminal’s gate, a silver-haired woman rose from a leather chair, holding a sealed blue folder against her cream suit.

Fiona Vance — my father’s old ally, the board’s chair, a woman who had known me since I was a girl doing homework in the corner of my father’s office.

Beside her stood Arthur Vance, the company’s general counsel, calm and gray and holding, I knew, the legal machinery that was about to turn.