The Vanterpool Capital boardroom was on the top floor of the company's headquarters, a glass-and-steel building on the Bellhaven waterfront that my grandfather had built in 1987 and never updated. The table was mahogany. The chairs were leather. The view was a gray expanse of Atlantic and the container ships moving in and out of the harbor.
I arrived twenty minutes early. I wanted to see the room before the room saw me.
Arthur Reed was already there. He nodded when I walked in. "You came."
"You told me to."
"People don't always do what they're told."
"I'm not people."
He almost smiled again. Almost.
The board members filtered in over the next fifteen minutes. Seven of them, all men over fifty, all in suits that cost more than my rent. I knew three of them by sight: the CFO, the gene
