Gio waited until the door was fully shut before he set the letter on Arianne’s desk, sliding it across with two fingers like it might need careful handling.
"This came through the front office an hour ago. Formal letterhead, proper channels, nothing slipped under a door or left with a stranger." Gio waited while she picked it up. "It’s from Summers Corporation. Signed by Rafael himself."
Arianne read it once, then again, the language of it precise in a way that told her more than the words themselves did. A request for a meeting, framed as a matter of mutual family interest, proposed at a neutral location of her choosing, at her convenience, no urgency attached to the phrasing anywhere she could find it.
"He wants to know me," she said, half to herself. "That’s the actual request, underneath the corporate dressing. Not a negotiation. Not a business matter. Just a meeting."
"That’s how I read it too." Gio remained standing, hands loosely clasped in front of him. "Do you want me to draft a decline? I can have it back to his office within the hour, polite, final, no room left for a second attempt."
"Not yet." She set the letter down, aligning its edge with the desk’s, and reached for her phone instead. "I want Franz and Gilbert to see this before I decide anything."
Franz arrived first, reading the letter standing up, his jaw tightening by the second line and staying that way through the rest of it. "You’re not seriously considering this."
"I haven’t decided anything." Arianne watched him set the letter down harder than he needed to. "But I also haven’t ruled it out."
"He’s spent years photographing you without your knowledge. That’s not a footnote I’m willing to forget because he’s dressed a request in nice paper."
"I’m not forgetting it. I’m the one who read the folder Nate put together, remember." She kept her voice even, the same register she used for board disputes she’d already half-decided the outcome of. "But he’s also the reason Nate finally found a name to chase. Whatever he wants from me, I’d rather learn it face to face, on my terms, than spend the next year guessing at it from a distance."
Gilbert arrived a few minutes later, read the letter in considerably less time than Franz had, and set it down without any visible reaction at all, which unsettled Franz more than an outright objection would have.
"You’re going to say yes," Gilbert said. It wasn’t a question.
"I’m leaning that way." Arianne looked between the two of them. "If I refuse, he waits and asks again eventually, or he stops asking and does whatever comes next without me ever knowing what that is. If I accept, on my own terms, in a place I choose, with people I trust close enough to reach me in under a minute, I get to see exactly what he wants instead of guessing at it through Nate’s investigation."
"And if what he wants is something none of us are prepared for?" Franz’s voice had dropped low, not calm, the difference audible to anyone who knew him well enough to hear it.
"Then I’ll have found that out somewhere I chose, instead of somewhere he did." She reached for his hand, and he let her take it, though his fingers stayed tense around hers longer than usual. "I’m not doing this alone, and I’m not doing it unprepared. I want Gilbert in the building. I want you close enough to reach me. And I want it on neutral ground, not his office, not mine."
"The Wexford, then," Gilbert said. "Pemberton Corp owns it. Private room, one entrance, and staff who already answer to me if anything goes wrong."
"The Wexford." Arianne nodded once, the decision settling into place the way decisions did once she’d finished weighing every angle of it. "Draft the acceptance, Gio. Same tone he used. Formal, brief, no urgency in it either."
"I still don’t like it," Franz said, though the fight in his voice had thinned into something closer to reluctant agreement.
"You don’t have to like it. You just have to trust that I know what I’m doing." She squeezed his hand once. "I’ve spent eight years letting that family exist at a distance I controlled. I’m not about to lose that control now, just because he finally decided to ask instead of watch."
"I trust you." Franz’s grip on her hand eased, though it didn’t let go entirely. "I trust him a lot less."
"That makes two of us." She let a small, unhurried smile take some of the weight off the room. "Which is exactly why Gilbert’s walking that floor plan himself instead of leaving it to anyone else."
"Small mercies." Gilbert’s mouth curved just barely at her tone, though his eyes stayed on the letter, reading it a third time with the same flat attention he gave any document that might later matter more than it looked like it did now. "I’ll have security walk the Wexford floor plan before we confirm a date. No surprises, on either side."
"How soon?" Franz asked.
"End of the week, if the room’s available. I don’t want to give him time to read hesitation into a longer wait, and I don’t want to rush it either." Gilbert set the letter down flat. "Three days is enough for security to do it properly without looking like we’re stalling."
"Three days, then." Arianne looked to Franz, who nodded once, reluctant but no longer arguing. "Gio, tell him Thursday, early afternoon. Keep the tone exactly as formal as his."
"Already on it." Gio gathered the letter and slipped out, leaving the three of them alone with a decision none of them had made easily.
"I’ll be in the building the entire time," Gilbert said. "Not in the room, unless you want me there. Close enough that it doesn’t matter which."
"I know." Arianne folded her hands on the desk, the letter’s absence leaving a clean space where it had sat. "Thursday, then. We’ll know a great deal more by Thursday evening than any of us know right now."