The email arrived on a Monday morning in late March.
Priya knocked on her door at nine-fifteen with a printed copy of it — Priya still printed significant documents, a habit she had explained once as believing that important things deserved physical weight, which Aria had found entirely correct and had never questioned.
“You need to read this,” Priya said. She set it on the desk. “I’ve read it four times. It’s real.”
Aria read it.
It was from the Chief Financial Officer of a national commercial real estate investment trust — a publicly traded company with properties in fourteen states and annual revenues that placed it firmly in the top tier of its sector. They had been following the Merritt case coverage and the subsequent Cole Mitchell visibility. They had reviewed the firm’s work on
