All Chapters of UNDISCLOSED : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

"You need to make a decision," Stellan said. "Before this becomes something you can't manage."Darian was at his desk in the temporary office on the fourteenth floor. It was six forty in the morning and the floor was empty and the West Loop outside the window was doing what it did at this hour, grey and unhurried, the city not yet fully committed to the day.He had been sitting here since five thirty."Tell me again," he said. "Exactly what you have."Stellan's voice on the phone was careful and measured in the way it got when he believed he was right about something and was being patient about it. "A photograph. Taken approximately three and a half years ago outside a preschool in Lincoln Park. The child in the photograph is approximately one year old in the image. Dark curls." A pause. "Grey eyes, Darian."Darian said nothing."I had someone look into it further," Stellan continued. "The preschool enrollment records list the child's name as Seren. No father listed on the emergency c

"You're in my spot," the woman said.Darian looked up from his laptop. The coffee shop was nearly full and the woman standing in front of him had a bag over one shoulder and a folder under her arm and the specific expression of someone who had been looking forward to something and had arrived to find it occupied."I don't see your name on it," he said."It's the corner seat. By the window. Away from the door." She looked at him evenly. "It's the only table in this entire place where you can work without someone walking past and reading your screen every four minutes."He looked at his screen. Then at her. "You've been counting.""I've been sitting at that table every Tuesday and Thursday for seven months." She didn't move. "How long have you been coming here?""This is my third time.""Then with respect," she said, without a significant quantity of respect, "it's my spot."He looked at her for a moment. Then he closed his laptop and moved to the chair on the opposite side of the table.

"She didn't take the meeting," Conrad Hale said. "She ended the call and hasn't responded since."Stellan was at the window of his New York office on the thirty-second floor, looking at a city that had never once made him feel small. He had worked carefully to ensure it never would."She wasn't going to take the meeting," he said. "That was never the point."A pause on Hale's end. "Then what was the point?""To let her know I'm coming." He turned from the window. "To give her enough time to make a decision before I arrive and take the decision out of her hands entirely."Hale was quiet for a moment. He was a good attorney, careful, discreet, and experienced enough to know when his role was to ask questions and when it was to simply listen. "And your brother. Have you spoken to him since yesterday?""Briefly." Stellan sat behind his desk and looked at the folder in front of him without opening it. "He's angry.""That's understandable.""It's manageable." He said it with the specific co

"I'm outside your building," Rowan said. "I have Seren. Childcare fell through and I have a site meeting in forty minutes and I didn't know where else to go."Nia was already on her feet. "How far are you?""We're at the entrance now."She looked through her office glass wall at the floor. Darian's temporary office was four doors down on the left. The door was closed. Lights on. Jacket visible on the back of his chair.Somewhere on the floor."Stay at reception," she said. "Don't come through the main floor. I'm coming to you right now."She hung up and moved.Seren was wearing her yellow raincoat and had Mr. Roof tucked under one arm and the alert focused energy of a child encountering a new environment and filing everything about it away for future reference."Mama's office!" she announced the moment she saw Nia pushing through the glass doors."Yes." Nia crouched to her level and kept her voice easy and light. "And we are going to be very quiet because people are working. Can you d

"This isn't about the Henriksen account," Nia said.Darian looked up from the menu he hadn't been reading. "No.""Or the Morrison review.""No."She put her own menu down and looked at him across the table from the small Italian restaurant three blocks from the office that she had suggested specifically because it was public and quiet simultaneously, the kind of place where conversations could be serious without becoming scenes."Then what is it about," she said.He was quiet for a moment. The restaurant moved around them in its unhurried Tuesday evening way of low conversation, the particular warmth of a room that had been feeding people for a long time and had no interest in anyone's complications beyond making sure their food arrived correctly."The divorce," he said. "I want to talk about the divorce."She had prepared for this. She had known, from the moment he sent the dinner invitation through official channels with the specific formality of someone who understood that what the