Page 6 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

She set the coffee saucer down on the corner of my desk, the cup rattling once, and walked out with more dignity than most would manage. I'd remember that.

Reese came in like a man stepping onto thin ice.

"Sir, I—with respect, are you sure? Patricia knows where everything is. She's got the board's whole rhythm memorized, she's the only one who can find anything in the old contract archive, and we are walking into the worst week this company's had in a decade. Losing her right now is⁠—"

"All the more reason." I picked up my phone, killed another incoming call without looking at the name. "I don't need someone who knows where everything is. I need someone who can get me what I ask for the first time I ask. Find me one. Today. Pull from the executive pool, borrow from Mark's office if you have to, but I want competent hands outside that door by end of day."

"It's a lot to expect someone to walk into cold⁠—"

"Reese." I let it come out flat. "Everyone in this building can be replaced. Everyone. Me included, on a bad enough day. Sentiment is a luxury and I cannot afford a single luxury this week. Are we clear?"

He swallowed. "Crystal."

"Good." I came around the desk. The summary I left where it lay, useless paper. "Now. The real problem. That study didn't crawl out of a hole on its own, and even if Brighton planted it, it doesn't bite unless our own data gives it teeth. So either our trials were clean and somebody can prove it to me in twenty minutes, or they weren't, and somebody buried a signal in a sub-analysis and let me walk into a launch with my throat bare." I buttoned my jacket. "I want the head of R&D in the small conference room. The one with no windows. Forty minutes."

Reese was tapping at the tablet already. "I'll see if Dr. Milton is⁠—"

"Not on a call. In a room. Across a table from me, with every dataset from every phase, and an explanation I can actually use." I stopped at the door and looked back at him. "And Reese. If the explanation is good, we go fight Brighton together. If it's not—" I let the pause do its work, the way my father had taught me before I was old enough to shave. "Then by Monday I'll be looking at a new head of R&D, and you'll be the one who set up that interview. So make sure I'm in that room with the person who can either save this or hang for it. Understood?"

"Understood, sir."

He went. The door clicked. The phone lit again, and again, that runway full of circling planes, and I let every one of them ring out into nothing.

I stood at the window a moment longer than I should have, knuckles on the glass, looking down at the slick gray streets twelve floors below. Two thousand jobs. A drug that worked, I was certain it worked, three phases of data that I had believed in the way you believe in things you'd staked your name on. The launch was the thing I'd built my whole adult life toward, the thing that would finally make my father look at me and see not the heir but the man who'd outgrown him.

And somewhere in this building, in a database I couldn't reach because a forty-page summary had landed on my desk instead of the truth, the answer was waiting. Clean, or dirty. Salvation, or the end of everything.

I went back out to Patricia's empty desk to hunt for a pen, because apparently, mine was missing too. When I saw the note stuck to her monitor that simply read MADDIE, I frowned and picked it up.

Maddie? Had she called in the midst of all this chaos? No, there were no missed calls from her on my personal phone and she wouldn't call my secretary unless it was something that wasn't time sensitive. Probably about the launch party.

As if flowers and gourmet food were going to be capable of saving this absolute disaster.

I crumpled the note and tossed it in the bin, snatching up the pen that had written it. It was the kind you'd buy in a pack of ten at any store, but for now, it would have to do.

I had more pressing matters to attend to.

4

MADDIE

The text had come through at seven that morning, while I was still in bed with my coffee going cold on the nightstand.

Party's still on. I have an announcement to make and it's the perfect stage so make sure everything is perfect.

I'd read it four times before I set the phone down.

An announcement. Until last night, I hadn't been sure there'd even be a launch party. For a week Damon had circled the decision, and twice I'd heard him on the phone with Mark, his voice clipped, saying maybe they pulled the whole thing, maybe a rooftop celebration was the last thing the company needed with that study still bleeding all over the financial pages.

And then this. The perfect stage.

I sat at my vanity now and worked the clasp of an earring through my lobe, watching my own face in the glass try to guess what it meant. An announcement made on a rooftop, in front of every journalist who'd spent two weeks sharpening knives. Either Damon had found a way to win, or he was about to do something reckless enough to look like winning. With him, lately, I couldn't always tell the difference.

I'd chosen a black Ferragamo evening gown. The black was armor. High at the throat, narrow through the waist, the kind of thing that would look good on camera but wouldn't command attention. If Damon wanted the perfect stage, then I would be the perfect wife standing on it, gleaming and silent and exactly where I was supposed to be. Just like always.

I'd checked everything twice already, by phone, from this very chair. The catering manifest. The bar build. The lighting rig that would wash the rooftop in warm gold once the sun dropped behind the skyline. With the press circling, I couldn't afford a single ranunculus out of place. A wilted centrepiece would become a metaphor in someone's column by morning. Sterling's house in disarray. So I'd called the planner three times and the lighting tech twice and stripped the menu of anything that photographed poorly.

Damon couldn't leave the office to come collect me. He'd told me that much in a second text of only two words: Meet there. So I'd drive myself, alone, to my husband's triumph or his unravelling, and stand behind him while he made it.