Chapter 114: Diane

Chapter 114: Diane
Amelia's POV

"I want to stay and fix it properly," Grayson said. "Not step aside and let lawyers issue statements and wait for it to blow over. That's not fixing it, that's just delaying it."

He said it looking directly at me, not at his phone, not at the wall, at me, because he needed me to hear it and I needed to see him mean it, and he did, completely, and that mattered more than I could explain.

"Then that's what we do," I said.

Something settled in his face and he nodded once and went back to his phone and started making calls that were not to his board chair and not to his lawyers, and I took the girls upstairs for their morning routine because they didn't care about Hayes International or board meetings or a journalist named Joel Reeves and that was actually exactly what I needed right now, to sit on the bathroom floor helping Clara figure out where her shoes went while everything else moved around us.

By nine AM the article had been shared so many times the numbers had stopped feeling real, and by ten Grayson's public statement was out, not the one the board had drafted, his own, written the night before while I was putting the girls to bed, and it was short and direct and said exactly what he'd told me in the kitchen, no corporate language, no managed regret, just a man saying plainly what he'd done and why and what he was going to do about it.

Elena called at ten fifteen and said "this statement is going to either save him or destroy him" and I said "I know" and she said "how are you" and I said "I'm okay" and she said "Amelia" in the voice that meant she could tell I wasn't saying the whole thing and I said "I'm okay and I'm also holding a lot right now and I'll tell you more when I can talk properly" and she said "I'm coming over" and I said "not yet" and she said "tonight then" and I said "yes."

Grayson came into the kitchen around eleven and sat down and said "the board is meeting at two. I'm going to attend and I'm going to tell them the same thing I told the press." He paused. "If they want to remove me after that they can try."

"They won't," I said, because I knew the numbers and I knew what the shares looked like and I knew that Hayes International without Grayson was a different and lesser thing and the board knew it too even if some of them would never say it directly.

"Maybe not," he said. "But even if they do, that's not the thing I'm thinking about today."

"What are you thinking about," I said.

"Diane Webb," he said simply. "And what she needs from this."

We'd talked about her the night before after the call, about what she'd said and what Grayson had said and the forty minutes in between, and Grayson had told me she'd been trying to get someone at Hayes International to speak to her directly for five years and had been bounced between PR departments and legal teams and had eventually gone to the press because it was the only door left open, and I thought about that, a woman widowed at thirty-one with two small children spending five years just trying to get someone to acknowledge that her husband's death had mattered and being handled at every turn.

"She wants an acknowledgment," I said. "Not money, the settlement already dealt with money. She wants someone to say out loud that the railing failed because a safety report was buried and that her husband's life was worth more than one company's quarterly numbers."

"Yes," Grayson said. "And I'm going to make sure she gets that. Properly, publicly, on record."

He had a call with his lawyer at noon and I heard his end of it from the kitchen, the lawyer going through the risk of each statement Grayson planned to make, the exposure it created, the precedent it set, and Grayson listening to all of it patiently and then saying "I understand the risks and I'm proceeding anyway" and the lawyer going quiet in the way lawyers did when they'd given their advice and it hadn't been taken.

The board meeting was at two and Grayson left and I sat in the kitchen and waited and Elena came over at two thirty without asking again because that was Elena and I was glad she did, and she sat across from me and didn't try to make it smaller than it was, just sat with me while it was exactly the size it was.

"Do you think less of him," she said, after a while.

I thought about it properly before I answered because it deserved a proper answer. "No," I said. "He was young and afraid and he made a cowardly choice and a man died and he's been carrying that for six years and the carrying changed him in ways I can see now looking back." I paused. "I think the person he is now would never have signed that report. I think what happened six years ago is part of why."

Elena was quiet for a moment and then said "that's either very wise or very generous" and I said "probably both" and she almost smiled.

Grayson came back from the board meeting at five and walked into the kitchen and said "they didn't vote to remove me," and there was nothing triumphant in it, just a statement of fact, and I said "good" and he said "Diane Webb is releasing her statement tomorrow morning. Her lawyer contacted mine an hour ago."

"What does it say," I asked.

"Her lawyer wouldn't share the full text," he said. "Just that she's acknowledged the call and that she's considering what she heard." He sat down. "Which is more than I deserved."

I looked at him across the table and said "you called her. Five years of closed doors and you opened one. That's not nothing."

He looked at his hands and said "it doesn't bring him back."

"No," I said. "But it's still not nothing."

We sat there quietly for a moment and then Clara appeared in the doorway of the kitchen having apparently escaped from wherever Elena had settled them, and she looked at us both with the serious evaluating expression she got sometimes like she was checking that everything was okay, and Grayson looked at her and something in his face softened completely and he held his arms out and she walked over and climbed into his lap and patted his face with both hands the way she did when she'd decided someone needed comforting, and he held her and closed his eyes for a second and I watched and felt the particular love of seeing the person you chose choosing to be better even when it cost them everything.

Then my phone buzzed and it was a message from a number I didn't recognise and when I opened it my stomach tightened because it wasn't about Diane Webb or the board or the article.

It was a photo.

Grayson at a restaurant I didn't recognise, sitting across from a woman I'd never seen, leaning forward in a way that looked very much like he was listening to something very important she was saying, and the timestamp on the photo was from three weeks ago, and the message underneath it said simply:
Do you know where your husband really was on the fourteenth?