Hope Sterling Cross is sixteen years old and she is, by any reasonable measure, a problem.
Not a bad problem. Not the kind that requires intervention or concern or the specific worried conference between parents that her friends' parents seem to have regularly about their teenagers. Just — a problem in the way that very smart, very certain people are problems. The way they take up exactly the right amount of space and make it impossible for you to argue they're taking up too much.
She sits at the breakfast table on a Monday morning in September reading the financial section of the newspaper on her tablet, which is not what most sixteen-year-olds read on Monday mornings but which is entirely consistent with who Hope has always been, and she says to Damien, without looking up:
"The Meridian Group acquisition is going to fail."
Damien looks at her over his coffee. "What makes you say that?"
