David Grant, CEO of Westmont Trading Group. My sister’s employer. A man I had met exactly twice: once at a company holiday party Megan had brought me to three years earlier, and once briefly at a charity auction she attended for work. He had no reason to be at a Colorado cemetery on a Thursday afternoon unless something had pushed him there.
He said my name quietly and scanned the crowd in a way that told me he was checking who was within earshot. He told me we needed to talk, not here, not today with the family around. He said my sister had brought him something to keep safe, that there were documents, and that I should come to his building that afternoon. Then he added one specific instruction: don’t tell Mitchell. Don’t tell Beth. Don’t tell anyone in the family.
Then he walked away.
I stood there with the pastor still speaking behind me and thought about the phrasing for a long time. Not keep this between us. Not let’s talk privately. Don’t tell them. Said with the specific weight of someone who has already decided that certain people in the gathering are a different category from the person he is speaking to.
I thought about Megan. Practical, methodical, allergic to drama, constitutionally incapable of making anything more complicated than it needed to be. She had once spent forty minutes explaining to me why she organized her file folders by date instead of topic, and I had sat through it because I loved her and because she was right. If she had decided to leave something with her employer instead of with her family, that was not an impulsive decision. That was the considered choice of a woman who had thought carefully about who she could trust and arrived at an uncomfortable answer.
I watched Mitchell and Beth for another few minutes from across the cemetery.
His devastation was imprecise in a way genuine emotion is not. Genuine grief is specific: it catches you at unexpected moments, misplaces itself in the middle of ordinary gestures, shows up in your face when you don’t intend it to. Mitchell’s showed up exactly when someone was looking and relaxed the moment they looked away. I had watched soldiers fake grief during operations. He was better than most of them, but he was still faking.
Beth never tried to fake it. She simply stood beside him with the posture of a woman waiting for something to conclude.
I didn’t go back to the house with my parents that afternoon. I told my mother I needed air, kissed her cheek, and drove to the address on the business card I found folded into my pocket where David Grant had placed it sometime during our thirty-second conversation at the graveside.
He met me at the staff entrance, not the lobby. He looked like a man who had spent the past several days carrying something he wanted to put down. His jacket was off, his tie loosened, his face five years older than I remembered from the holiday party. He brought me through a narrow hallway that smelled of cleaning chemicals and old coffee and into a small windowless conference room with metal chairs and a long table and no decor: the kind of room that exists in every office building for conversations that need walls without windows.
See more on the next page
