The conference room on the fifteenth floor had too many lawyers in it.
She counted four on Leonardo's side, two from her own counsel, a communications director from the Vasconcelos PR team who had the particular energy of someone managing a fire they had not started and resented deeply, and Rafael, who sat slightly apart from the formal legal configuration in the way of a man whose role was relational rather than documentary.
Leonardo was at the head of the table. She sat to his left, which was where Dra. Tavares had positioned her — not opposite, which would have implied opposition, but adjacent, which implied something the lawyers were, she suspected, very deliberate about.
He looked like he hadn't slept. He was composed, because he was always composed, but there was a quality to the
