The document the grey suited man had delivered was twelve pages long and dated eighteen months before my father had signed me over to Damien.
I read it at the dining room table with coffee going cold at my elbow and Damien sitting across from me with his elbows on the table and his hands folded under his chin, watching me read with the patience of a man who had already read it three times and was waiting to see where I landed.
The substance of it was this.
Gerald Mercer had not only borrowed from Hargrove Industries. He had borrowed from a second party, a private equity firm called Vantage Meridian, using the Hargrove debt as collateral in a financial arrangement so convoluted it required two readings to follow. Damien’s acquisition of me through the marriage arrangement had inadvertent
