At 6:12 a.m. Pacific time, my lawyer sent me a link to a filing with my company's name on the first page and Elara's on the last.
Nightjar Capital had commenced its tender offer. The Schedule TO was live, the offer to purchase was on its way to shareholders, and the price was $38.50 a share in cash. The filing specified an initial period of at least twenty business days. That gave my board time to answer. It did not give us twenty days to pretend the offer wasn't there.
I was in my office with the harbor still black beyond the glass. On the desk lay the regency declaration Everett had taken back without signing. He had left it there after the elders went home, face down under a draft press release. I pushed it into his folder and opened the offer documents.
Everett came in without knocking. He saw the screen.
“It's early for them to have cleared the banks,” he said.
“The bank commitments are attached.”
“How firm?”
“Read them.” I turned the screen. “Sixteen hundred million in debt commitments. Another sixteen hundred from Nightjar and its limited partners. Eight hundred from Tessellate Partners.”
“Three point two billion under management,” he said, reading the headline from the summary. “And she's buying a four-billion-dollar company.”
“Assets under management aren't a checking account. She knows that. She's showing where the balance comes from.”
Everett bent closer to the exhibit listing financing conditions. His cuff brushed the edge of the desk. Last night he had laid a clean page beside the Deed and expected me to let him sign it. This morning he was looking for a missing signature on a bank letter. I wanted him to find one if it was there. I also wanted him to stop looking at everything as a way to get the seal back.
“The rights plan stays,” he said.
“Yes.”
“She can't take ten percent without diluting herself.”
“She can ask the other owners what they think of my price.”
Everett looked up. “Your price?”
“Twenty-seven thirty at yesterday's close. This is my company to defend, Everett. Don't give me a speech about what she'll do if she wins.”
He shut his mouth. Outside the office, a cart rattled over the join in the corridor tiles. The building had returned to work. There were people at those desks whose pensions held our stock, and people at the mills whose pay depended on what we could actually sell. None of them would be helped by an answer drafted for three elders in a locked room.
“I'll convene the independent directors,” I said. “Have counsel start the response. Use the operating figures, the timber forecasts, all of it. We can tell shareholders the offer undervalues us if we can demonstrate it.”
“And the Deed?”
“Stays out of a shareholder filing.”
He collected his folder. The unsigned declaration came with it.
Cass called at 6:34. The market had been open four minutes.
“Thirty-six eighty,” she said. “Now thirty-seven oh six. I've got two different screens telling me two different stories.”
“Both of them are above twenty-seven thirty.”
“I can do subtraction. Have you spoken to her?”
“No.”
“Julian.”
“I haven't.”
She breathed out against the receiver. Cass had voted for the rights plan. She had also spent the night calling our forestry managers instead of sleeping, asking whether any shipments had been interrupted. She would fight the offer for reasons the nine directors could put in a public document.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Call the mill managers again. Tell them operations don't change because a bid opened this morning. If someone asks about the land, send them to counsel. Don't promise anything about the sale.”
“There isn't a sale.”
“Then it's an easy promise to avoid.”
A notification flashed on my screen: a trade at $37.18. Buyers saw a chance of getting $38.50. Some plainly thought they wouldn't. No amount of telling them I was Alpha would settle that difference.
Cass was quiet a moment. “The elders are asking whether she has to come back to the Ground.”
“She's done what the Deed required in person.”
“I didn't ask what it required.”
Through the glass, a ferry sounded once on the water. Last night I'd asked Elara why she hadn't called. I could still hear the answer she gave me. Cass waited, but I had nothing to offer her that would improve it.
“Neither did I,” I said. “Not when I should have.”
She ended the call after a curt promise to ring the managers.
By seven, the boardroom had been cleared for the directors' briefing. I went down to check the video connection myself. The water glasses were gone. Someone had wiped the table, but the paper placemat under the Deed's stand still showed a small rusty mark where Elara's thumb had touched its edge. Everett hadn't noticed it or hadn't cared.
At the far end of the room, a charcoal scarf lay in a clear property sleeve on the side credenza. A white label read FOUND ON CHAIR, 12:26 A.M. No name. One of the overnight staff had put it aside before cleaning. I recognized the scarf: Elara had looped it twice around her throat when she came through the doors. At some point after midnight she must have taken it off. I hadn't watched her leave.
I could have sent it to reception. Instead I picked up the sleeve, then stopped with my thumb against the plastic seam.
Everett was in the corridor, dictating language for the board's response. If he came in, he would see a lost scarf and wonder why I was standing still with it in my hand. I broke the sleeve's paper tab and pulled the wool free.
Cold rain and her familiar scent rose first. Close enough, and only here, I caught another trace in the weave. Milk soap. A child's sweat, dried into the wool where a small hand might have gripped it. Under that, the mineral bite of wet cedar roots on the Held Ground, a scent I knew from the creek beds after rain. My fingers tightened around the scarf.
Elara had not been back to those creek beds. She had stood beside me last night in a room of glass and carpet, five years after she left. The trace could have come from something she'd packed, or someone she'd held, or a visit I knew nothing about. Scent would not tell me whose child it was. It wouldn't even tell me when the wool had touched them.
I set the scarf on the clean table and touched the place where the child's trace was strongest. A small snag had caught a pale thread, too short to be a clue to anything. Across the room, the screen woke for the directors' call. My own face appeared in the camera preview, drawn and badly lit.
There had been a time when I could have asked Elara what was in her luggage and expected an answer. I'd forfeited that privilege in front of an entire pack. I folded the scarf without lifting it to my face again.
The young Blackfern guard from last night appeared at the doorway. He had changed into a daytime jacket; the radio was clipped high on his shoulder again. His eyes went to the opened property sleeve.
“Mr. Thorne. Housekeeping said to put that with lost property.”
“Who found it?”
“The overnight attendant. On the chair by the windows.”
“Anyone else handle it?”
“I don't know. I only logged the sleeve this morning.”
That, at least, was a question he could answer by looking, not guessing. I laid the scarf back on the table, outside the sleeve. The directors would be joining in minutes. Whoever had picked it up overnight might have carried it through the lobby; someone might have put it back. I could return it untouched now, and never know whether its traces had been gathered here or before she arrived.
“Bring me the lost-property custody record,” I said. “And the access logs for this floor, from midnight until you logged the sleeve. Start with who moved the scarf.”
The guard looked from it to the open offer filing on the wall screen. “Does Ms. Vane know you're asking?”
“No.” I placed my hand over the label so he could read the time without touching the wool. “Keep her name out of the report. I want a record of the object, nothing about where she's staying.”
He left to fetch the logs. On the screen, the first director's name appeared beside a green microphone icon. The scarf stayed on the table in front of me, its paper seal broken by my hand.