Page 46 of Worth the Trouble

He didn’t say the rest, and that was worse than if he had. She waited for him to be angry, and instead he went back to work, steady as ever, and the mare settled under his hands as if the world hadn’t moved. Maybe his hadn’t.

Hers had.

Her father was on the phone when she let herself into his suite, and he wound the call down with the unhurried manner he had that let a person know exactly how unimportant their arrival was. When he turned to face her, he looked almost cheerful.

“Well,” he said. “Now you see.”

“See what?”

“What I’ve been telling you since you were nineteen.” He poured himself two fingers from the bottle on the sideboard. “These people were never going to be your people, Cecelia. The first hard wind, and look how fast the doors close. It’s not personal. It’s arithmetic.”

“A man lost half his business today because of me. That felt personal.”

“The horse trainer.” Her father waved the glass. “He’ll recover or he won’t. That’s not our problem. Our problem is procedural. The lawyers say the council can’t prove intent. It’s Kyle Sinclair’s word against the wind. So here’s how this goes. You say nothing. You sign nothing. You don’t so much as jaywalk in that town. We let the noise die down, we refile in the spring through the Billings attorneys, and you and I are gone before the first real snow.”

“No.”

It came out of her so simply that they both paused to look at it.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m not going to stay quiet. I did this. Not the company, not the lawyers. Me. I’m going to go to the council and ask them to run it again properly. Notices, flyers, the newspaper. I’ll pay for the printing myself.”

Her father set the glass down with a click. The cheer was gone, and what replaced it was worse than shouting. It was his boardroom manner, the one that had ended careers between the salad and the entrée. “You will not go near that building.”

“Dad.”

“Think, Cecelia. For once in this conversation, think like what I raised you to be. You walk in there and confess, and you hand them the intent they can’t prove. You expose the company. You expose me.” He stopped, visibly rebuilt the sentence, and started again. “And for what? So the shopkeepers will smile at you again?”

“So I can stand in that town without lying to it.”

“You want a career in public relations.” He laughed, one hard note of it. “Then here’s the first law of the entire profession, free of charge. You never volunteer for the blame. Never. And you’re telling me you want to build a firm on doing exactly that.”

“Yes,” she said, and the strange thing, the thing she’d remember for the rest of her life, was how calm she was. “That’s exactly the firm I want to build. The kind you hire when you’re done hiding things. There’s a market for it, Dad. It’s called every town you’ve ever left.”

The silence in that suite was total.

“If you do this,” her father said, “you do it as a private citizen. No title. No salary.” A beat. “No trust.”

There it was. The lever he’d kept oiled her whole adult life. The trust was hers on paper and his in practice, and they both knew which of those had been running her calendar.

She picked her jacket up off the chair. Her hands were perfectly steady, and for once in eight years she was glad of it. “Then I guess we’re both about to find out what I’m worth without you.”

She was at the door when he spoke again, and he had lost his footing, a thing she had never once heard.

“Cecelia. If you walk into that council, you’re choosing this town over your own father.”

She stood with her hand on the knob and gave that sentence the honest minute it deserved, because it deserved one. He was her father. He was wrong about nearly everything, and she loved him.

“No,” she said. “I’m choosing me. The town’s just where I finally did it.”

The council wasn’t in session, but three of its five members were in the building. The clerk went and found them, but nobody offered Cecelia a chair.

That was fair.

She stood in front of the counter in the good gray suit she’d worn to close deals, and she set her purse on the floor at her feet, and she told them.

That her father had wanted the rezoning meeting kept quiet. That she was the one who'd gone to Kyle Sinclair and asked him to hold the notices. Twice. That Kyle had done it because she'd made it easy and made it sound routine. She told them whatever the council decided about him, they should know he was the least guilty person in the chain. She admitted that she’d known it was wrong while she was doing it. And finally she told them that she hadn’t brought a lawyer and wouldn’t be bringing one.