He strained against the officer’s grip until the man told him, quite calmly, that one more movement like that would turn this from an escort into an arrest, and something in the flat certainty of it reached Flynn where nothing else had, and he went still.

Fiona stepped between us then, and she did the thing that finally stopped him — not with force, but with a piece of paper.

She held the blue folder open to the signed resolution, so he could see it: the board’s votes ranged above my new title, and beneath everything, on the founding documents the resolution rested on, my father’s signature, and beneath that, mine.

That was what stopped Flynn cold.