Diana Mercer had known about Hargrove Industries for fifteen years before my marriage to Damien.
She told me this over coffee that went cold while I was too absorbed to drink it, in the Mayfair restaurant with the light coming through the windows in the careful way of expensive places that understand the value of good lighting.
The connection was this. Robert Hargrove and Diana had been in the same financial circles in the mid-nineties, when she was building her career and he was expanding the Hargrove portfolio into European markets. They had been, she said with the precise diction of someone choosing words carefully, close. For approximately three years. In a way that was not professionally categorized.
She let this settle.
“He was married,” she said. “I knew that. It was a different
