William Spade sat hunched over his desk, stared blankly at his monitor, and aggressively tapped the back of a plastic pen against his knuckles. The bullpen of the newsroom was a chaotic mess of ringing landlines, shouting editors, and the constant clatter of mechanical keyboards, but William was completely checked out.
'Thirty-five days,' he thought, his eyes dropping to the creased, ink-stained notepad sitting next to his keyboard. 'Thirty-five days since the charity gala.'
He still remembered that night, the blinding flashbulbs of the senior paparazzi, and the absolute sea of famous faces rolling up in armored limousines. Nobody had cared about the quiet young man walking down the red carpet. The veteran reporters were too busy looking for aging tech CEOs and legacy real estate heirs. But William had spent the previous night digging through the sudden inheritance from the Meridian Group. He had memorized the face from a single, low-resolution attachment in a legal notice.
