Marlene had already called the payroll department.

My company badge would be deactivated the following afternoon.

I had spent years wondering whether my father knew what happened inside his own company.

Now I understood the more painful answer: he knew enough to look away.

“I’m not a child you can send away,” I said.

“No,” he admitted.

“But the trust arrangement on your grandmother’s house has been complicated, and Marlene believes—”

“Please don’t use Grandmother to explain this.”

That house had been where I grew up, the one place I could still picture my mother laughing.

When my mother died, I was thirteen.

Dad remarried within two years.

Since then Marlene had treated every memory of the first Mrs.

Langford as an obstacle to be managed.

Dad paused at the doorway.