~Reo’s~

“You think cleaning up headlines fixes your house?” Mr. Rannigan leans forward. “You can’t polish the floors if the foundation is cracked.”

The boardroom’s cold. Too cold. But I don’t ask for the thermostat. I sit through the numbers, the quarterly reviews, the analyst updates. Everything feels like noise today. Like I’m underwater.

Rannigan waits until the meeting breaks. Until the others file out with polite smiles and folders under their arms. Then he moves toward me. His gait has always reminded me of a lion; deadly, reckoning, unforgiving. And this morning, he looks exactly like the ghost of every father I tried to impress.

“I heard you’ve started...