For one week in May, twenty-eight members and associates of the Meridian family gather in a conference room above Lake Geneva. Seventeen voting cards, forty hotels, 4,816 rooms, 3,140 employment contracts, and a proposal that fits into a single sentence: the family gives up control and keeps the income.

Sienna Vaughn tells the week from inside the whole group. Renata Sa measures the air in the hall before anyone sits down. Anders Krohn reads out the deferred maintenance, house by house. Ida Lindqvist works a night shift at a reception desk that is not hers. Marlene Rothgeb costs out twenty-six months of building work in Vienna. And Aurelio Meridian, seventy-three, arriving from Porto after fourteen hundred kilometres, asks only one thing: how many.

Nothing here is decided by speeches. It is decided in cubic metres, in rounding differences, in a clause nobody wants to put in writing, and in forty rooms that were never entered in any book.

Meridian is the tenth volume and the close of the series; it can also be read as the single week it describes.