Page 9 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

I handed him the flute. I didn't decide to, my hand simply opened and gave it away, and he took it. I turned and walked toward the glass doors with my spine straight and my chin level, the way I'd been taught, the way that made the staff step aside without quite knowing why.

The doors sighed shut behind me and cut the noise to a hum.

The corridor was cool and dim after the gold. A service hallway, the one we'd run the catering through, and at the end of it the door to the stairwell, the kind no guest ever opened. I put my hand on the cold bar and pushed through into the concrete throat of the building. The door clanged shut behind me and I was alone.

I got two steps down before my legs stopped agreeing.

I sat. Not gracefully. I went down onto the cold steel of the stair with the black gown pooling under me, and I gripped the railing with both hands because the world had begun to come loose at its corners. My heart was going wrong. Too fast, then a stutter, then too fast again, slamming up against the high collar of the dress like it wanted out. The air came short. I pulled at it and it wouldn't fill, like breathing through a straw, like the stairwell itself had thinned, and a high white sound started up behind my eyes.

Emily.

He'd brought Emily into the company. Into the building. Into the family business that was the one thing Damon Sterling loved without conditions—Curtis had said it not twenty minutes ago, the only thing he loves without conditions—and now she would walk those halls, and sit in his meetings, and lose arguments to him at two in the morning over bad coffee, and I would hear her name at dinner the way I now heard the word launch. Regularly, incessantly.

The girl he'd wanted. The girl who'd left. The girl into whose absence my parents and his had poured me, like setting a cheaper stone where the real one fell out.

And he didn't even tell me.

My hands were shaking on the rail. I pressed my forehead to the cool of it and made myself name things, the way my therapist Kara had taught me in that quiet office with the good chairs. Name five things, bring yourself back into the room. The cold of the railing. The grit of the concrete through silk against my shin. The clang still ringing faint in my ears. The smell of the stairwell, dust and old paint. The white of my own knuckles.

The breath came back by degrees. Not all the way. Enough that the white sound dropped and the corners of the world settled into place, and I was a woman sitting on a service stair in a designer gown with her heart still kicking, alone, while above her the party she'd built celebrated everything she wasn't.

I had never left a party early in my life.

Eight years. I'd hosted through migraines and a sprained ankle and the flu that put two of the staff in bed. I'd stayed until the last investor went home and the last journalist filed out and the planner asked if I wanted the leftover flowers boxed. I'd stayed when I wanted to claw my own face off with boredom and stayed when I wanted to scream and stayed because staying was the job, the only job, the thing I'd traded everything else to be perfect at.

The perfect wife stands a half-step behind. The perfect wife smiles for the cameras. The perfect wife does not give her champagne to her brother-in-law and walk down a fire stair and out of her husband's triumph.

I got my feet under me. The rail took my weight while I found them.

And then I did the thing I had never done.

I went down. Not up, not back through the gray door into the gold and the noise and the place beside him where I was supposed to stand. Down, one flight and the next, my heels loud on the steel, the black skirt gathered in one fist, until the stairwell let me out into the parking level where the air smelled of concrete and exhaust and my own car sat waiting in the dark exactly where I'd left it, because no one had come to collect me. No one was going to notice I was gone.

I didn't text him. I didn't tell Curtis. I got into the car and shut the door on the silence and sat there a moment with both hands on the wheel, breathing, the city humming somewhere overhead with my flowers and my lights and the woman my husband had known a very long time.

Then I drove myself home.

6

DAMON

The night was going exactly the way I'd built it to go.

I stood beneath the lights with a glass I hadn't touched and watched Emily handle the press like a pro. A man from the Journal lobbed a question about the trial's methodology and she caught it, turned it, gave him back something cleaner than what he'd thrown. The pack of them leaned in. Phones up. Lenses ticking.

This was the right call. I'd known it the moment her name had surfaced unexpectedly in the candidate search, and I knew it harder now, watching her disarm a room that had come up here sharpening knives. Sentiment was a luxury. I'd told Reese as much, days ago, over a forty-page summary that hadn't been worth the paper. You don't hire the comfortable choice in a war. You hire the one who wins.

And Emily won. She always had.

"Dr. Cavendash, given your history with Mr. Sterling—" a woman began.

"Our history is two people who couldn't agree on a single thing and were usually both right," Emily said, and the laugh that followed was warm, and I felt my own mouth go with it before I'd decided to let it.

Mark drifted up at my shoulder, with a flute of something he wasn't drinking in his hand.

"Press loves her," he said. Not quite a compliment.

"The press should. She's brilliant."