Dispatch from a Colored Room

Finessing a few things

I have to finesse a few things here. Aimée isn't as credulous as you might expect at first; the next day, she summons me to a meeting before the vice-president handling Greyking's finances, where she rehearses all the things we'd gone over the night before. This leads to an exchange of highly charged words and my summary termination, which is of course the point. There's to be no ambiguity about allegiances, no double-agenting. Perhaps also obviously, Aimée withdraws her business from Dawnroad, which makes the Greyking board meetings even tenser than they already were.

Aimée doesn't want to go back to a bank, so I get the books. I try to tell her that "dogsbody" was not merely my gripe about the job but, in fact, perilously close to my actual title; but, to Aimée, a banker's a banker, so I'm in over my head trying to keep everything straight. One good consequence of the break with Dawnroad: The meetings die down. It's just me, Aimée, Sim, and a bunch of equity that no one quite knows what to do with. 

And the documents. Dawnroad ships us an awful lot of documents—mostly, I think, as psychological warfare; they come in dribs and drabs, with no particular organization, and almost all of them are completely useless. They're all things that Duskstreet held for Gauthier Leblanc, of course. And one day, I get Sim to sleep, get back to sifting the boxes, and find a battered, spiral-bound notebook with "GL" written in the upper right corner of the cover.

I wish I could say I hesitate before I read it. But I know I’ll have to show it to Aimée, and I know I might not get it back after that. And so, over that otherwise unremarkable box of ledgers, memos, manifests, and receipts, I read all the letters I’ve read to you so far today; and I read letters I don’t have time to bother with tonight, a thousand absorbing banalities and touching platitudes sketching Gauthier Leblanc’s rise up the rather short corporate ladder of Greyking Books; and, last, I read this.