I took a breath.
“Emeric. Open the sealed file.”
There was a silence.
Then, carefully: “All of it?”
Below me they got into a line for another photograph.
“All of it.”
Another silence, longer.
“Delia. Once I send these I can’t unsend them.”
“I know.”
I could hear him typing. That man is seventy-one and types like a court reporter.
Then he said: “The first set’s uploading now.”
And at that exact moment, twenty feet below me, my husband reached into his coat for his phone.
I watched his face from above.
I watched it stop.
PART 2 — YOU JUST PAID FOR THE ROOM
My name is Delia Farrow now. It was Delia Ravell until 2015.
My father was Aldous Ravell and he spent thirty-four years buying and leasing buildings to medical practices. Not glamorous. Clinics, day-surgery units, two small private hospitals, and about eleven consulting buildings across this state.
He died in 2013 and left the whole of it to me, because I was the only child and because I had worked in it since I was twenty-two.
In 2015 I married a surgeon and put every asset into a trust with Emeric Sallow as trustee, which is an entirely ordinary thing to do and which my father’s own lawyer recommended in about four minutes.
