The legal meeting took place in a conference room on the fourteenth floor of a downtown high-rise, a space that belonged to the firm Sanders Media had retained for the fund's incorporation. The elevator ride up was silent, the doors opening onto a reception area furnished in muted greys and chrome, the kind of lobby that communicated competence without warmth. A receptionist with a calm voice and a headset asked him to wait, offered him coffee he did not want, and disappeared behind a glass wall.
He sat in a leather chair and watched the receptionist's hands move across her keyboard. The building hummed faintly, the sound of climate control and distant conversation, the white noise of commerce. He had been in a hundred rooms like this — deal negotiations, acquisition meetings, partnership discussions — but this one felt different. Those meetings had been about taking something: a company, a stake, an advantage. This one was about giving something away.
