The Merger Nobody Asked For
The forty-second floor of Whitfield Tower smells like money and lemon polish, and Ashley Whitfield has always found the combination faintly nauseating. She steps out of the private elevator at 9:58 for a 10:00 meeting, because arriving exactly on time is a small rebellion she allows herself in a life otherwise scheduled down to the minute. Her heels click against marble the color of bone. Her blazer is the sharp charcoal one, the one that makes junior executives sit up straighter, and she's mentally rehearsing the quarterly numbers she memorized last night — distribution costs in the Southeast corridor, a dip in Q3 that isn't as bad as it looks if you account for the warehouse fire in Tulsa.
She has a folder tucked under one arm. She will not need it.
Margaret, her father's assistant for as long as Ashley can remember having opinions about anything, doesn't smile when she sees her. That's the first wrong note, a single sour string in an otherwise familiar chord. Margaret always smiles. Margaret smiled through the year the company almost lost the Meridian contract, smiled through Ashley's parents' divorce announcement, smiled, Ashley suspects, at funerals.
"He's waiting,"…
