I let the phone ring twice in the quiet hotel suite. Then I put it on speaker.
“Hello, Arthur.”
“Serena! Thank God. You have to come back. Right now.”
Even frightened, he could only give orders.
In the old days, that tone would have sent me back to the office before he finished the sentence. I would have called Thorne, found temporary funding, and stayed awake until the company looked stable again.
“No.”
“Don’t say no!” he pleaded, his voice cracking. “You don’t understand! Thorne is going to destroy us. Forty million dollars! He’ll take the company, Serena! Everything we built!”
*We.* Arthur had put his face on the company and my work underneath it.
He used the word whenever there was debt to share. In interviews, success belonged to the founder alone.
“What we built is gone, Art
