Page 66 of Iridescent
Right. The bruise.
A glance at the darkened glass wall gives me the faint reflection of a man with a swollen cheekbone. I look about as good as I feel.
“I’m fine,” I say shortly. “Thanks, Adrian. Go home. Get some rest.”
He nods, hesitates like he wants to say more, then thinks better of it. “Good night.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
I blow out a breath and rise from my chair. The office around me is growingquiet as the workday dies. Normally I would be one of the last people out, but today I do not have it in me to keep pretending I am getting anything done.
I need to see my wife.
I need to try to explain… if she will even let me.
On my way back to my office, I pull out my phone. No new messages from Yara. I sent her a few texts throughout the day, none of them answered. The read receipts tell me she has seen them, at least. Small mercies.
I stare at the screen, resisting the urge to call her. Give her space, I remind myself for the hundredth time. She has every right to be furious with me. Every right to want distance.
By the time I reach my office and push through the heavy glass door, evening light is spilling through the floor-to-ceiling windows, painting the room in gold and shadow. I shrug off my suit jacket and toss it over a chair, then loosen my tie the rest of the way. My head is pounding again.
As I move around my desk to shut down my computer, a knock sounds behind me.
“Come in.”
Claire, my personal assistant, steps into the doorway.
“Mr. Navarro, I’m sorry to interrupt. Lobby security has a Ms. Ortega downstairs requesting to see you. She does not have an appointment. She asked that I inform you it concerns your mother.”
My brow furrows. What has she done now?
I stare at Claire for a beat too long, then say, “Send her up.”
Claire inclines her head and withdraws.
Less than a minute later, there’s another knock. The door opens.
She steps into the doorway, framed by the hallway lights. A tailored ivory dress beneath a camel coat draped loosely over her shoulders. Blond hair swept into a low chignon. Her gaze meets mine, and she flashes me a smile far too bright for the hour.
“Hi, Xavi.”
Chapter 12
There are very few things I take pride in. Seeing a problem before it turns costly. Building my company without my father’s name opening doors for me. Being Yara’s husband.
The first was learned brutally.
My father used to say that every problem has a point of origin. Nothing begins when it finally becomes visible. By then, the damage is already underway. The real beginning is always earlier—a shit decision, an overlooked detail, a weakness somebody failed to take seriously. He liked to test me on that when I was a boy. He would place a situation in front of me—a deal gone bad, a family slight, a servant dismissed, a headline he disliked—and ask the only question that mattered. What set it in motion? He had no interest in the wreckage at the end. He wanted the first fracture, the small miscalculation that made the rest inevitable. If I failed to find it quickly enough, he corrected me with his fists until I was bleeding on the floor.
For a long time, that was my weakness. I noticed problems too late. I saw consequences before I saw cause. I only understood what something was once it had already taken shape. That changed when I got out from undermy parents’ roof and built a life no one handed me. A cramped office above a laundromat taught me more than my father’s house ever did. By the time I turned that office into a company and that company into an empire, tracing a problem back to its source had become instinct.
Which is why the unease needling the back of my mind irritates me.
Isabel is smiling. Brightly.
Under other circumstances, I would take it as a good sign. After everything surrounding her father’s death, a smile is easier to look at than grief. Easier than tears, and the brittle composure she has been wearing. Even so, I cannot shake the feeling that I am looking at something I should have understood sooner. Maybe it is the pretext she used to get in. My mother.
“Are you going to invite me to sit,” Isabel says, glancing at the chair across from my desk, “or are you going to keep me standing here?”
