"Your security guard is standing right there. He doesn't look eager to throw me out."
Walt squared his shoulders. "Mr. Sterling, with respect, perhaps you should hear him out."
"Walt," Victor said, warning threaded through the single word, "you've been here twenty-six years. Don't make me question that." The older man stood still.
Daniel realized with a strange ache that Walt had spent nearly all the years since Frank's humiliation at this same door, watching the same pattern repeat and deciding, again and again, how much he could afford to challenge it. Today, for reasons neither of them fully understood yet, he was no longer willing to look away.
"Fine," Victor said, opening his arms as if granting an absurd favor. "Thirty seconds. Explain why you're wasting my time."
Daniel looked at the black coupe, then at the man who had humiliated his father.
"Twenty-five years ago, Frank Brooks came into this showroom with a coffee can full of cash. He'd saved for three years to buy my mother a car for her birthday. She had been taking the bus to her night shift since before I was born."
"A coffee can?" Tyler said, barely containing his laughter.
Victor lifted a hand to silence him, though there was no sympathy in the gesture. "Sad story," he said.
"What does it have to do with me?" Daniel kept his eyes on him.
"Someone laughed at my father and told him to take his rusty can and his cheap jacket outside. He walked out with his head down, and my mother never got the car."
Victor's expression showed not recognition but irritation.
"Young man, I don't remember your father. And I don't care what happened a quarter century ago. Business is business."
Daniel nodded once, as though Victor had confirmed something he had suspected.
"I figured you'd say that. That's why I came. To see whether this building still has the same heart."
"Heart?" Victor repeated with a sharp laugh.
"Walt, take him out. Now."
Walt stepped away from the corridor and faced his employer directly. "I was standing at that door the day Frank Brooks came in," he said.
"I remember every second of it. And I won't do the same thing to his son."
Victor's nostrils flared.
"Then you can pack your things too. Both of you. Out."
Walt took a breath. "Sir, I've given this place most of my working life. But I'll go if that's what it takes to stand with him."
Daniel felt a mixture of gratitude and sadness so strong that for a moment he could not speak.
Then he touched Walt's arm and said, "Nobody is getting fired today. Not yet."
He turned back to Victor.
"I came to buy that Meridian. I'm not leaving without making a proper offer. Do you accept wire transfers?"
Victor stared at him, then smiled the smile of a man who believed he had finally found the line that would expose a bluff. "Three hundred and forty thousand dollars isn't pocket change, son."
Tyler laughed. "He probably can't wire a pizza order."