Ethan’s recovery instinct had now fully engaged, and the calculation Emily could see running behind his eyes was rapid and unsentimental. He was a businessman. He understood, suddenly and completely, what Alexander Reed in this room meant, and the understanding reorganized everything. She watched him shift.
“Look,” he said, his voice dropping into a lower, more collaborative register—the register he used with important investors, with people he needed something from. “If this is about the settlement—if Emily has concerns about the terms—I’m sure we can look at the numbers again. We can renegotiate. I’m open to that. I want to be fair.”
Alexander looked at him for a moment. Then a short, quiet sound escaped him that was not quite a laugh but contained amusement of the driest possible kind.
“Money,” he said, as though sampling the word and finding it revealing.
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out his phone. His movements were unhurried. He navigated to a contact with the ease of a man who has made a thousand such calls, and he raised the phone to his ear, and when someone answered on the other end, he spoke with the precise brevity of a person who does not waste words.