DAVID
I had known Simon Laurent for twenty years.
I had watched him build Laurent Industries from a mid-sized firm into something that made governments nervous. I had watched him negotiate across tables from men twice his age with twice his resources and walk away with everything he came for. I had watched him lose his first wife to illness and rebuild himself afterward with the particular discipline of someone who understood that grief was not an excuse to stop functioning.
In twenty years I had never seen him make a decision he couldn't justify strategically.
Until Scarlett.
I sat in my car outside the Laurent estate on a Thursday morning and thought about that for a while before going inside.
Simon had called me the night before. Brief conversation, the kind we had when something
