The Successor

Chapter 1: Pie

Nathan Reed asked his first question before the turkey was carved.

“Settle something for me,” he said, smiling down the table at Daniel. “A quarterly audit at a company your size. Is it a room full of accountants counting jars of cold cream, or is it all software now?”

Sarah Warren watched her older brother reach for his wine before he answered. That was new. Daniel was forty-two, the chief financial officer of Warren Skin, and for most of his adult life he had been the man at every party who would explain an audit to you whether you had asked or not. Now he took a long swallow of pinot noir and set the glass down with great care, as if it might tip over on its own.

“Bit of both,” Daniel said. “Mostly it's the outside firm asking for documents we already sent them.”

“Must be intense, with the IPO coming.”

“Everything's intense with the IPO coming.” His smile arrived a second late. “Ask Sarah. She's rewritten every label in the Bloom line twice since August.”

“She never tells me anything,” Nathan said. Under the table his hand found Sarah's knee and squeezed. “I have to read about this family in the Wall Street Journal like everybody else.”

That got a laugh. Even Sarah's mother smiled, and that was rare enough on a holiday that Sarah noticed it.

The dining room of the house on Mohawk Ridge had been designed to make people feel small, and it worked. The north wall was a single sheet of glass two stories high. Beyond it the hills of Litchfield County rolled away in brown and pewter toward a low, heavy sky. The other three walls were fieldstone, pulled out of the ground on the property when Sarah's parents built the house in the nineties. A fire burned in a hearth big enough to stand up in. The table seated fourteen. Today there were seven of them bunched at one end, and the empty chairs stretched away down the room as though they were waiting for guests who had decided not to come.

Her mother sat at the head of the table, where she always sat. Cynthia Warren was sixty-eight years old. Her silver hair was cut in a sharp line at the jaw, and she wore cream cashmere and no jewelry except her wedding ring and a thin gold watch. Thirty-nine years ago she had mixed the first batch of Warren Cold Cream in a rented lab in Bridgeport, using a blender she had carried over from her own kitchen. Now the company sold four hundred products in thirty countries, and in January it would go public at a valuation the bankers kept rounding up. Before the roadshow, the board needed a name. Someone had to stand beside Cynthia in those conference rooms and tell investors who would run Warren Skin when she stepped back.

Everyone at the table knew it would be one of her children. Nobody had been told which one.

At the far end, Sarah's father stood carving the turkey with the patience of a man who had spent forty years fitting braces onto the teeth of nervous children. Richard Warren was seventy-one, tall and a little stooped, with big gentle hands and a habit of humming when he concentrated. He had retired from orthodontics six years ago and now kept bees, eleven hives on the far bank of the pond below the house. He talked about them the way other men his age talked about grandchildren. On holidays he did what he had always done. He kept the peace. He refilled glasses before anyone asked and changed the subject before anyone noticed it needed changing.

“White meat or dark, Nathan?”

“Dark, please, sir. And thank you again for having me.”

“Don't call him sir,” Sarah said. “He'll get ideas.”

“I already have ideas,” her father said, and laid two slices on Nathan's plate with a wink.

Sarah had been seeing Nathan Reed for four months. He was thirty-seven, with dark hair going gray early at the temples and the kind of warm, easy attention that made people tell him things. He worked in wealth management at a firm in Hartford called Haverford Partners, and he had a way of listening that made her feel like the only person in a crowded room. They had met in late July at a gallery opening in Stamford. He had asked her what she thought of a painting, and then asked why, and then asked again. By the end of the night she had told him more about herself than she had told the last man she dated in a year.

This was the first time she had brought anyone home for Thanksgiving in almost a decade. She had warned him on the drive up.

“My mother will interview you. My brother will try to talk to you about money. My sister-in-law will price your watch. My little brother might not talk at all. My dad is the only normal one.”

“Sounds like every family,” Nathan had said.

“It is not like every family.”

Now she watched him work the table the way she had watched him work the gallery that first night, and something small and uneasy stirred in her chest. He was very good at it. He was asking a lot of questions.

He asked Melissa, Daniel's wife, about the house she and Daniel were thinking of buying in Rye, and Melissa, who was forty and had once planned weddings for hedge-fund partners, lit up and talked for four minutes about a kitchen island. He asked Daniel when the auditors would finish their fieldwork. He asked Sarah's mother whether the board had met with the underwriters yet, and Cynthia said, “Several times,” and looked at him a moment longer than she needed to.

Then he turned to Jacob.

Sarah's younger brother sat at the corner of the table nearest the door, as though he wanted the option of leaving. Jacob was thirty-one and too thin. He wore a navy blazer over a gray hooded sweatshirt, which was either a joke or a compromise. He had been two years sober in September, and there had been a small cake at the company's Stamford office with a candle shaped like a 2. Sarah had been so proud of him she cried in the elevator afterward. He had not wanted to come up this weekend. Their father had driven to the train station in Wassaic to collect him personally, and Sarah suspected their father had begged.

“I've got a buddy who's in recovery,” Nathan said, cutting his turkey. “Kevin. Eighteen months now. He told me the holidays are the hardest part, but not because of the drinking. He said the hardest part was the lying. Keeping two calendars. The one everybody sees, and the one he actually lives.” He put a bite in his mouth and chewed and watched Jacob across the table. “I always thought that was an interesting way to put it.”

Jacob's fork stopped halfway to his mouth.

For a second nobody spoke. The fire popped. In the kitchen, the oven timer went off for the rolls nobody had remembered.

“Good for Kevin,” Jacob said. He put the fork down without eating.

“More stuffing?” Their father was already on his feet with the bowl. “Jake, you've barely touched yours. Nathan, you have to try this, it's my mother's recipe, there are chestnuts in it.”

The moment passed. Sarah let out a breath and nudged Nathan's ankle with her foot. He looked at her with an innocent face, eyebrows raised. What?

She would remember that look later. She would remember all of it later.

The light outside had gone from pewter to slate by the time the plates were cleared for seconds. The weather service had upgraded the forecast twice since breakfast. A nor'easter was coming up the coast, and Litchfield County was supposed to get eighteen inches, maybe two feet, starting at dusk. Melissa kept checking her phone. Daniel kept checking the window.

Nathan turned to Sarah's mother.

“I read the profile of you in Forbes last spring,” he said. “I have to tell you, Mrs. Warren, the origin story is incredible. The lab in Bridgeport. Mixing the first batches in a kitchen blender.”

“It was a very good blender,” Cynthia said.

Another laugh. Nathan smiled and kept going.

“And then the fire in eighty-nine. I can't imagine it. Losing your lab and your partner in the same night. Christine Barrett, wasn't it? And you rebuilt from that. That's the part that gets me. The insurance can't possibly have covered—”

The crash was enormous in the stone room.

Sarah's father had been coming back from the kitchen with the oval serving dish of sweet potatoes, the heavy blue one that had belonged to his mother. It hit the fieldstone floor and burst. Orange mash and blue shards sprayed across the stones and up the legs of the chairs. Melissa yelped and pulled her feet up.

“Oh, damn,” Richard said. “Oh, damn, I'm sorry. Clumsy old man. My hands were wet.”

He stood looking down at the mess. His face had gone the color of the ash in the fireplace.

“Dad, sit down. I'll get it.” Sarah was already up.

“No, no. I've got it.”

“Richard.” Her mother's voice was quiet and perfectly level. “Let Sarah.”

Her father looked at her mother. Something passed between them that Sarah could not read. Then he nodded and sat down heavily in the nearest chair, and Sarah went to the kitchen for the broom and the dustpan.

When she came back, Nathan was on his knees beside her father's chair, picking up the larger pieces of the dish with his bare hands. “These are big pieces,” he was saying. “I bet you could glue this.” Her father did not answer him.

Her mother had turned to look out at the darkening hills. She said nothing more about the fire or about Christine Barrett, and nobody asked her again.

Pie came at five, just as the first flakes began to drift past the glass. Pumpkin and pecan, both from the bakery in Kent, because nobody in the family had baked anything since Sarah's grandmother died. Her father had recovered enough to make coffee. Jacob had gone outside twice for air. Daniel had opened a third bottle of wine without asking anyone if they wanted it.

Then Sarah's mother set down her coffee cup and tapped it once with her spoon.

Sarah knew that sound. Everyone at the table knew that sound. It meant the meeting had started.

“I want to thank you all for coming,” Cynthia said. “I know this year hasn't been easy. I know I've asked a great deal of each of you.”

Nobody spoke. Melissa had put down her fork. Daniel had his hands flat on the tablecloth.

“As you know, the board has asked me to name a successor before we go out on the road in January. I have made my decision.” She let that sit in the room. “I will announce it on Monday morning. You will each hear it from me first.”

“Mom,” Daniel said. “Come on. You can't just drop that and—”

“I can, Daniel. I just did.”

Then she smiled.

She smiled at Daniel, a small and patient smile, and he looked down at his plate. She smiled at Jacob, and Jacob's knee began to bounce under the table. She smiled at Sarah last, and held it, and Sarah felt the hairs rise along her arms.

It was the smile her mother used across a negotiating table, when the people on the other side believed they were holding a good hand and Cynthia Warren had already seen their cards.

Later, Sarah would understand that her mother had seen every one of them.

Outside, the snow thickened, and the hills disappeared.