“Anytime. You can always come to me if you need anything. I know that you trusted my mom when you worked for her. I want you to know that you can trust me, too.”

“I—I’ll be right back,” she said before she scrambled down the hall.

“Mina!” her uncle roared again.

She stepped into the corner office, ignoring the smell of stale cigarettes. The space was a pigsty with papers everywhere. There were discarded suitcoats and ties, dirty bowls and mugs, and an overflowing ashtray. She passed the small conference table and dropped her bag into one of his client chairs.

Her uncle turned in his high-back chair, dressed in a black suit and wearing a thunderous scowl. “What took you so long?”

“You said an hour.”

“Whatever. Sit down.”

Mina pulled her tablet out of her bag and sat in the second chair. “WTA Digital wants to purchase Bharat. The board is going to have to appoint a committee to determine if the value of the offer is equivalent to the value of the company based on forecasting and financials. Depending on the technicality of the patents Bharat has and how well management at Bharat cooperates, it’ll take a while to make that decision. This whole thing could take anywhere from ten days to months. WTA’s offer is only good for thirty days, but that can be renegotiated.”

Her uncle leaned back in his chair, resting his hands on his round belly. “Good. That’s very good. I want you to head the committee that’s reviewing the offer.”

“The committee has to be an impartial party.”

Sanjeev ran two fingers over his mustache. “I talked to a friend of mine who handles high profile acquisition cases. Even though I’m on the board, it wouldn’t be a conflict of interest if one of my attorneys takes the case. As long as they don’t report to me. I also talked to Deepak’s son at Bharat. They’re okay with my firm’s involvement. The remaining members of the committee will be selected by the rest of the board. They’ll need to be experts in business intelligence, integrity, and finance.”

“Okay. You do realize that I’ll have to be on site a couple times a week, right? I do have the bandwidth to take this on since I just closed out a bunch of cases, but court dates, depositions, and meetings for the rest of my workload will have to be rescheduled.”

“Fine. Do what you have to do. I want the committee to make a decision as quickly as possible, so if that means you set up a makeshift office there, so be it. Oh, and there is one more thing.”

“Shoot.”

“I’ll make you equity partner, with or without the arranged marriage to Virat, if you report to the Bharat board at the end of your review that we need to take WTA’s offer.”