PART 2
I let the phone ring three times.
Not because I enjoyed it.
Because after sixty-eight years, I had learned that silence is sometimes the only language arrogant people understand.
On the fourth ring, I answered.
“Franklin Reeves,” I said.
For half a second, there was only breathing on the other end. Heavy, sharp, panicked breathing. The kind a man makes when the floor beneath him has begun to crack and he has not yet accepted that he is falling.
“What did you do?” Brandon asked.
His voice was low, but it wasn’t calm. I could hear the tremor hidden beneath the anger.
I sat in my lawyer’s conference room with a pen still in my hand. Across from me, Martin Delaney, my attorney of thirty-two years, folded the signed papers into a neat stack and slid them into a blue folder. He did not look surprised. Martin had seen rich men lose empires, brothers sue brothers, widows discover secret families, and sons reveal exactly what kind of men they were once money got close enough to touch.
