“Julian?” Anthony choked, his voice squeaking into a terrified whisper.

“You, you’re—” “I’m alive, Anthony,” I said, and my voice carried across that silent room with all the authority I had spent thirty years building.

“And I believe my corporate audit is about to begin.”

I have thought about the faces around that table in the second before I spoke, and about what they revealed, because that boardroom was, in a sense, the whole story compressed into a single tableau.

Here were the people I had chosen, over thirty years, to surround myself with, the smartest and most powerful and most credentialed people in my world, gathered to divide my corpse’s estate before the corpse had finished dying.