“About you and Mrs. Montfort?” Elizabeth nodded. “Lots of them. Most of the staff around the world, actually. I used to get e-mails. . . .”

Now Hugh was shocked. “E-mails? From staff, asking about Georgiana?”

“I deleted them all,” Elizabeth said defensively.

“But why would anybody care?” Now he was angry. “My grief . . . I didn’t talk about it; it is entirely private.”

“You have to understand, you were famous at Mayberry,” Elizabeth explained. “What you did . . . it determined our pay, our Christmas bonuses, even our stock options. . . . People were always talking about you, asking about your love life.” She smiled disarmingly. “Most of those e-mails came from women, you see.”

“Oh.” He had the good grace to smile. “I see.”

“I wouldn’t discuss you.”

“I’m sure you didn’t.”

“But your previous secretaries . . .” Elizabeth said delicately.

Hugh winced. Of course—Rosa Vasquez and Charlotte Hurst—both had eventually broken down and sobbed their love for him into his chest or shoulder, ruining a couple of perfectly good suits.

“They talked about me?”

“They talked of little else. Your . . . dwelling on Mrs. Montfort.” The words used had been “obsession” and “morbid,” but she forbore to spell that out. “You know, sir, at first everybody dreaded you. The firings—the redundancies.”

“I realized that.”

“But later, as they got to know you—and that you apparently cared about the stockholders, and the staff—they liked you. They cared about you. It’s not all that surprising that they gossiped.”

“And the conclusion?”

“That without your work you would fall apart.”

Hugh took a sip of wine and reflected. People were not as un-perceptive as he had assumed. It was, he knew, a perfectly justified view of his character.

Mayberry, its revival and then its move to world dominance, had been his life. He enjoyed the game; it was chess against multiple partners, against the markets, the established houses, the press, the suppliers—winning had been everything.

And now, when he was close to the deal that would have constituted final victory—pouf—with the gloating words of a fat slob, it had all evaporated.

“Maybe that was true, once.” He admitted it. “But no longer. That’s not what my wife would have wanted.”

“And what about you?”

Hugh thought of Sophie.

“It seems to me there are other things worth living for. Things that, on balance, are even more important than big deals.”

He grinned. “You know what I’m realizing, Elizabeth?”

She shook her head.

“That Mayberry was just a job. And no job is worth getting bothered about.”

Elizabeth Percy gaped. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”