Need You Now Read Free Page B

I feel better already,” my boss muttered.
    “Me, too,” I said, joining in the lukewarm applause.
    I left the conference room quickly, as soon as the meeting broke, before anyone could ask what the heck I was doing there.
    My palms were sweating as I hurried down the hall to the elevator, but I tried to keep things in perspective. I wasn’t the first junior advisor in BOS history to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Any number of my predecessors had surely crashed a meeting of top producers. In the hallowed Paradeplatz Conference Room. With the chief executive from Zurich, the managing director of U.S. operations, and the new head of private wealth management in attendance.
    Good God, what was I thinking?
    The chrome elevator doors parted, and a man wearing a black suit was already inside. I entered and pressed a button, but the man froze the control panel with a turn of his passkey.
    “Patrick Lloyd?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    He looked like a Secret Service agent, and my impression wasn’t far from the mark. “BOS Corporate Security,” he said as he punched the button for the executive suite. “I need you to come with me.”
    My jaw dropped. I expected some good-natured ribbing from colleagues about the mix-up, perhaps even a brief reprimand from a divisional manager. But calling in security was over the top.
    “It was a mistake,” I started to say, but he wasn’t interested. We rode up to the executive suite, and he escorted me into the lobby. I was hoping the receptionist would recount our earlier conversation and clear things up, but she was away from her desk. My escort from Corporate Security directed me to a leather couch by the window, and he sat in the armchair facing me, as if keeping guard. The expression on his face was deadpan, even by Swiss banking standards. Had I still been in Singapore, I would have thought I was in line for a public caning.
    I surveyed the lobby. A Jasper Johns original oil painting hung on the wall opposite the van Gogh. Fresh-cut flowers were placed tastefully around the room in crystal vases. A table by the window displayed a small vase so priceless that there was actually a plaque to identify it as being from the Ming dynasty. A row of Swiss clocks on the wall caught my attention, each set to the time zone of a different trading market. New York. London. Frankfurt. Tokyo. Hong Kong. Singapore.
    Singapore. I thought of Lilly. She worked with BOS/Asia. Our relationship had been purely business at first, but we ended up dating for six months. Arguably the best six months of my life.
    I looked away, then checked the clock again, and a song popped into my head. In Singapore, it was a quarter after one, and I had a sudden vision of Lilly, all alone, and listening to that megahit by Lady Antebellum that seemed to be playing nonstop on the radio since our breakup. Need you now.
    Yeah, right.
    It was four weeks, exactly, since Lilly and I had gone for our last swim at Changi Beach. Anyone who worked at a place like BOS understood that “lose” was a four-letter word, but Lilly and I tried not to let that competitive spirit spill over to our personal relationship. I was better about it than she was; or it could be said that Lilly was better about it than I was. It depended on whom you asked—not that we were competitive about not being competitive. Swimming, however, was where the gloves came off. We did a mile every Saturday morning. This time, as we headed down to the ocean’s edge, Lilly broke custom. She didn’t snatch my goggles from my hand, pitch them deep into the seaweed, and shout her usual “Loser buys breakfast” as she hit the water with a good three-minute head start. Rather, she led me over to a large piece of driftwood, sat me down, and delivered the solemn words that no man in the history of the world has ever seen coming: “We need to talk.” The way she looked on that day would never leave my memory—the sad smile, her honey-blond hair blowing in