By sunrise there are three news vans on 53rd Street outside Marchetti Oncology's headquarters and a Bloomberg push alert on every phone in the city.
Overnight, my parents go from grieving to indicted in the court of public opinion.
Was Marchetti's pipeline already in trouble?
Did Tally Marchetti sign her family's IP over to her boyfriend before she died?
Is the Pierce takeover, in effect, his last act of kindness to her?
My father does not appear. My mother does not appear. The face PVP and the press are given is Diane Zhou, our COO, walking out of the lobby in a navy suit with a Xeroxed copy of the authorization in her hand. Her face is the color of old paper.
Dr. and Mr. Marchetti are unwell, she says. Marchetti Oncology will be working with Pierce-Vance during this period.
Working with or being acquired by? a reporter shouts.
Diane does not answer.
That ten-second clip of her not answering hits a hundred thousand reposts before the second cup of coffee gets cold in the newsroom. By nine in the morning the Wall Street Journal has run an unsigned op-ed titled When Devotion Outruns Sense: The Tally Marchetti Cautionary Tale. The comment thread is its own little colosseum.
Golden retriever girlfriend. Signed her family's company over to her boyfriend. Why are we surprised.
Pierce is cold-blooded but business isn't sentimental.
This is what happens when daddy doesn't raise his daughter to read a cap table.
I dress in a black wool coat and oversized sunglasses and let myself in through the freight entrance on 52nd.
Diane meets me in the conference room on the thirty-second floor.
She closes the door behind us. She does not say my name. She turns and bows her head — a very small, very private bow that she has been making since I was twelve, and that I have only ever seen her make to two other people, both of them dead.
Ms. Marchetti.
I take off the sunglasses and sit at the head of the table.
How many have they sent up.
Three teams. Legal, finance, audit. They're in the south conference room on twenty-eight.
She slides a binder across. They want the HER2 candidate file. The full preclinical and the Phase I dataset.
I open the cover.
The HER2 program is the one Harlan has been watching for two years. It is the cleanest first-in-class oncology asset on the East Coast. The night he asked me out, he hired a private fireworks barge to set off twenty minutes of pyrotechnics over the Hudson from the West 30s. He stood on the deck of a chartered Tribeca rooftop and told me he had never felt anything this clean.
Three days later, at a dinner at Daniel, he asked me what kind of moat Marchetti had on the HER2 program.
I told him I didn't really follow the science.
He smiled.
He thought I was a stupid girl.
I needed him to.
The conference room door opens without a knock.
A man in a suit walks in two paces ahead of his briefcase. Larry Quinn — Pierce's outside counsel, Sullivan-Cromwell-trained, the kind of attorney who bills out at fourteen hundred an hour and gets called Larry by his clients and that prick by everyone else. He has brought two associates and the careful smile of a man who has been told the room will roll over for him.
Ms. Zhou, he says. Mr. Pierce would like the data transfer completed by close of business.
His eyes catch on the back of my chair. The wool coat. He frowns.
And who is —
I turn the chair.
His face goes through three colors in two seconds.
Tally?
I look at him.
Can the dead not take a meeting?
Larry Quinn is the Pierce family's most reliable attack dog. I have watched him eat the lunch of better men than himself on six separate FDA matters. He pulls himself together quickly. He always does.
You're not dead, he says.
I don't answer.
Diane locks the door behind him.
Larry's face goes the color of an envelope.
Ms. Marchetti. I am sure there has been a misunderstanding here. Mr. Pierce was acting in the interest of corporate continuity.
I push the printed authorization across the table.
The signature is forged. The DocuSign certificate ID is real. Larry, you are very good at what you do. Tell the room what we call that.
His mouth gets thinner. Commercial authorizations admit of multiple interpretations.
Sure.
I pick up the remote.
The projector behind me wakes up.
The footage is from the security camera I installed in the smoke detector of Harlan's home office eighteen months ago — the camera he found and ripped out three months later, after I let him find it, and replaced with a camera I had spliced into the building's own riser system, which he does not know exists.
The frame is wide enough to show the desk. Larry Quinn is at the desk. He has nitrile gloves on. He is pressing a flash drive into the air-gapped MacBook, applying the DocuSign certificate to the forged authorization, and stamping a scanned wet signature in Times New Roman cursive across the bottom.
The timestamp at the corner reads 8:12 p.m. — two hours before the memorial service started.
Larry has stopped breathing.
Where did you get this footage, he says.
I smile.
Take a guess.
He lunges for the door. Two of the men Diane brought in from our private security catch him by the shoulders and put him gently against the wall.
I get up and walk over to him. He has worked his tie crooked in the scuffle. I reach up and straighten it for him.
Harlan sent you to take the HER2 file, I say. He didn't think to mention to you that the meeting might end here.
Larry's chest is moving. Tally. Don't be cute. The Pierce family is not a thing you survive crossing.
I lean in.
That's funny. He used to say the same thing.
I bring my voice down to just above the seam of his collar.
And then he carried the keys to his own vault inside on his own wrist.
His pupils contract.
That is the moment Larry understands. The death. The funeral. The forged authorization. The man at the door. It isn't a counterpunch. It is a trap, six moves deep, and every step Pierce-Vance has taken since two o'clock this morning has been the step I left open for them.
There is a noise downstairs. Diane checks her phone.
Pierce is in the lobby.
I sit back down at the head of the table.
Send him up.
Five minutes later, the door opens again.
Harlan Pierce is standing in the doorway. He sees the wool coat. The chair turned the right way. My face. His face does something I have not seen it do in five years.
It cracks.
Tally.
I lift my wrist and look at the watch he gave me on our third anniversary.
Mr. Pierce. You're seven minutes late.
Harlan walks in with six men behind him. He looks at Larry, pinned against the wall by people who are not on his payroll, and then he looks at me, and after the first three seconds of plain shock his face rearranges itself into something I have seen him use at Davos.
He laughs.
You faked your own death, he says, to make me feel guilty.
I watch him settle into that. The certainty. The familiar little smirk. He genuinely believes the universe arranges itself around his line of sight. He believes my death, my coffin, my burial were all set up so that he might pause his life long enough to glance my way.
Larry shouts from the wall. Harlan. She has the footage.
Harlan's eyes go flat. Shut up.
He sits down across the table from me, the way a man sits down to talk a younger girlfriend out of being dramatic.
Tally. Whatever this is, it stops now. Your parents are in a hospital somewhere. Marchetti will not survive a public stunt like this. Come home.
I slide a document across the table to him.
Sign it.
He looks down. It is a settlement-and-confession agreement. PVP admits to fabricating the authorization, to misappropriating Marchetti's trade secrets, to acting in bad faith on the night of my reported death.
His smile cools.
You want me to admit to a crime.
You don't have to.
I press the remote.
The screen behind me cuts to dashcam audio from the inside of his Range Rover. The timestamp is from the night of the Frick, twenty-two minutes after the ambulance pulled away.
His own voice fills the room.
If she's still breathing, drag it out. She's better off dead. It makes the Marchetti situation easier to handle anyway.
Harlan's head snaps up.
You wired my car, he says. You bugged me.
I let the silence hang for a beat.
You were so easy to work with.
His face finally does the thing I have been waiting five years to watch it do. The veneer of charm and condescension just goes, like he has set the mask on the table.
Heels click in the hallway outside.
Sloane Rivers walks in.
She does not look at me. She crosses to him first, her eyes red, her hand catching at his sleeve. Harlan. I saw the news on the way over. She's alive. Thank god, oh my god.
He grips her hand the way a man grips the last piece of rope he can find.
Sloane. Step outside, please.
Sloane sets something down on the table between us.
It is the cufflink. Bottega gold knot. Already pried apart along the seam. Inside the cavity, the coin-cell chip is visible, matte black, no bigger than a contact lens case.
She looks at him.
I read the ledger, she says, very quietly. Every account. Every transfer.
His eyes go to her like a freezer door swinging shut.
You betrayed me.
She turns. For the first time, she looks at me.
She tips her chin, just slightly.
Ms. Marchetti, she says. My contract is complete.