Page 35 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

Her face did several things fast and settled on wounded dignity. "I was being kind to a colleague who looks like hell. Forgive me for caring whether you fall over."

"Then care from over there."

The silence had edges. She gathered it up, made a small production of checking her watch, and said she was going for coffee, did I want any, in a voice that meant she hoped I choked. I said no. She left, heels hard on the floor all the way to the elevator.

The agency letter I needed wasn't in the stack on her desk. I went through the wire tray, then the top drawer, file by file. I wasn't snooping. I was looking for a letter with a federal docket number on it, in the office of my head of research, in my own building.

Her phone lit up on the blotter.

It was face up, no passcode screen, just the message sitting there on the glass under a number with no name saved to it.

When is the payment coming through? And what do you want me to do about the press? They keep calling the hospital and I don't know what to say.

The hospital. I stood there with a file folder in one hand and read it four times. There were a hundred innocent versions and I couldn't make a single one of them hold the word payment. I picked the phone up, and it opened to the thread, and I did the thing you do on a whim that divides your life in half. I scrolled to the top and read down.

The thread went back months ago. The number belonged to Raina Playne. Edward Playne's daughter. The woman in the coat over the pajamas, the shaking voice, the cameras turning. And the messages, read in order, were a script and a receipt.

He was hospitalized Monday. Cardiac. Is that usable?

Was he on the drug? Even briefly. Check the discharge papers.

He took it for two weeks, the cardiologist said his heart trouble goes back years, it's not related.

It doesn't have to be related. It has to be sayable. I'll send the wording.

Fragments of a conversation that had clearly been happening elsewhere, but enough to piece together where it had started, as unbelievable as it was.

Then, days later, there were wiring instructions.

Then, the night before the gala, the wording itself, grief-stricken, simple sentences.

Name the drug when the cameras are on you, do not answer questions, let them pull you away.

Then, the morning after, half the payment and a promise of the rest when coverage held. Then weeks of Raina coming apart in slow motion, saying the press keeps calling the hospital, my father saw it on the news from his bed, I don't think I can keep doing this, and Emily's replies coming back cool and short.

You can. You are.

I was still holding the phone when she came back with two coffees.

She stopped in the doorway. She looked at the phone in my hand, and at the open drawer, and at my face, and she set the coffees down very carefully on the bookshelf, and I watched her choose a tone.

"You went through my phone." Cold, level, the wronged party. "That's a violation, Damon. Whatever you think you read⁠—"

"When is the payment coming through?" I recited. "And what do you want me to do about the press? They keep calling the hospital." I turned the screen toward her. "She wasn't a stranger, Emily. You found her. You checked whether her father's heart was usable. You wrote her lines and you wired her money and you aimed her at me in a ballroom, at my company, at three hundred cameras. Tell me the innocent version of this story. I'll wait."

The wronged party held on another moment and then it left her face like water going out of a sink, and what was underneath was tired and almost relieved, and that unnerved me more than anger would have.

"Brighton was already inside the original trials," she said. "Did you know that? Before I ever took this job. They had consultants picking at the methodology for months, quiet, patient, waiting for a news cycle worth spending it on. It was coming, Damon. Some version of that night was always coming. The only question was whether it arrived in a shape they chose or a shape we chose. So I chose the shape. A sympathetic face, an unrelated cardiac event, a claim we could kill in a lab. We debunk Raina Playne completely, publicly, the science holds, and the next accusation lands on a market that already watched one die. It was a controlled demolition. I was protecting this company."

"You put a frightened woman in front of cameras with a script. Her father watched it from a hospital bed."

"I gave a drowning family more money than that hospital will see from them in a lifetime, for one bad evening pinned on a drug that did nothing wrong." She said it briskly, a line item. "The drug is safe. I knew the accusation was false, that was the entire point, you cannot safely demolish a true accusation. When the press reveals that, all Brighton's accusations—and there will be more, that's how these things work—will lose their teeth. Raina is even willing to say they paid her, for the right price."

"And if it hadn't been false?" My voice came out low. "If there'd been a real signal in that study, Emily, I would want it found. I'd pull the drug off the market myself, that night, with my own statement. People take what we make on faith. That's the whole company. There is no version of this where you protect Sterling by lying to the people Sterling exists for. What you did is insane, and I'd say that to you in front of the board with my job on the table."

"The board." She laughed, short and unamused, and crossed the room toward me, and her voice changed registers into the one she used to use across a library table so many years ago. "You're missing it. You're standing in it and missing it, you always did. I watched you grind yourself down for months for people who'd sell you in an afternoon, and I was the one in the room at two a.m., I was the one who could keep up with you, and you came alive, Damon, you know you did. We both did, because we're meant for each other."

Her voice hitched as she took a breath. "I should have said yes in college. I've known it for years and I came here knowing it. And you go home, when you bother to, to a woman who arranges flowers. A socialite your father picked out of a catalog, spoiled, decorative, shallow as a coat of paint. You're too good for that and everyone in this building knows it. You need a woman with a mind. An equal. Someone who understands what you are."