Page 84 of Under Her Protection

"Yes."

"Extend the access. Do what needs doing. Report to your brother and to me, and only to your brother and to me."

"Copy."

Leo, at the foot of the table, did not smile. But the corner of her mouth pulled once, briefly, at the mention of Avery as her brother, and Avery, beside her, rolled her eyes once at the ceiling and did not correct it.

"Sister," Avery said, mild.

"Sister. My apologies."

"Noted."

Vivienne kept her hands on the glass.

She put her right hand flat on the glass in front of her, signet down, and she did not take it off. It was the only part of her she was going to permit visible movement to for the remainder of this meeting, and she permitted it stillness. Fournier, at her shoulder, brought her a glass of water she did not drink. Legal asked three procedural questions and Vivienne answered each of them in single-sentence instructions. PR asked if she wished to prepare a personal comment. She said no. PR asked if she wished to make herself available to a long-lead interview in which the personal angle could be, carefully, reframed. She said no. PR asked if she had any preference as to which of the major outlets should receive the legal cease-and-desist first. She said, "All of them. Simultaneously. At ten."

PR wrote that down.

Avery, at the foot of the table, dropped her chin once at Vivienne's ten. Vivienne, at the head, gave her the half-beat of acknowledgement that twenty years of Circle trading had taught her women did not need to speak aloud to exchange. Avery's hands on the tablet were lean and ringless and fast. She was not her brother. She was a version of her brother's stillness that had been put, instead, into an analyst's chair, and Vivienne, who had recognised Leo at the first meeting in the library as a woman to be taken seriously, registered Avery in the forty seconds of her first sentence as a woman to be taken seriously in a different register.

Vivienne, for the first time in five weeks, felt a small specific relief.

The relief was the relief of having, around her, not only Leo. Two of them was better than one, and two of them who were siblings was better than two of them who were not. She would not, she understood, be on her own in this boardroom. Leo had drawn in her sister, and Leo's sister was, visibly, competent, and Vivienne had given the woman access to the fourth-floor server, and she did not, this morning, regret having done it.

The meeting ran for another forty-two minutes. PR drafted a single statement. Legal drafted three injunctions. Avery produced, by eight forty-five, a preliminary identification of the Geneva server the envelope had come out of, an identification that was going to be, by nine thirty, the beginning of the police case Dominique had been building for three weeks. Leo said eleven words in the entire meeting. She watched Vivienne's hands on the glass table, and she watched the door, and she watched Avery, and at eight fifty-eight she took a call at the window and came back and said a single "Copy" to Vivienne, which was, Vivienne understood, an update she would be given in private.

At nine Vivienne dismissed the room.

Avery packed her tablet into a thin leather portfolio that she had brought into the boardroom without Vivienne's having registered her bringing it, and at the door she paused, and she looked at Vivienne across the length of the table, and she said, "We will find her."

"Yes."

"I am good at this."

"I can see."

"Madame."

"Ms. Cole."

Avery left.

---

Vivienne asked Leo to close the door.

Leo closed the door.

There was no one in the boardroom now. The glass table was empty but for Vivienne's phone and a single untouched glass of water. Outside, below, the Tuileries was pale in the grey December morning.

"Leo."

"Yes."

"Sleep in my room tonight."

Leo looked unsure for just a second before she nodded.