Page 69 of Boardroom Ties
“Eat something today,” he advises. “You look like shit.”
Then he taps the door once with his knuckle, and they’re gone.
I stand on the sidewalk and watch them go.
But just before I turn to go inside, my phone buzzes in my coat pocket.
Not the work phone. Theotherone. The black one, the small one. The burner.
I pull it out.
CASS
I need you. Now.
22
CASS
Raymond shakes the bottle again. “I asked you a question, Cassandra.”
There’s a high, thin whine inside my skull, like the sound a microwave makes right before it dings. It’s panic. So much panic. An ocean of it, lapping at the inside of my ribs.
But I can’t show it. One wrong micro-expression and he’ll know everything that matters.
“Oh!” I clutch the towel tighter against my chest. “Those. God, you scared me.”
Raymond doesn’t blink. “These are prenatal vitamins, Cassandra.”
“Right. Yes. Okay, look—” I push wet hair off my forehead and force out a laugh that doesn’t quite land. “I know what it looks like, but they’re a beauty thing. I swear.”
He stays planted at the threshold of my closet with the orange bottle clenched in his fist.
“Hair and nails,” I babble. “Every girl at Pilates has them in her bag. There’s a whole thing about it online. Hailey Bieber posted about it back in, I don’t know, October? November? She does this whole get-ready-with-me where she’s like, here’s my collagen, here’s my biotin gummies, here’s my prenatal—and it blew up. Sephora sold out. The folate makes your hair grow, you can ask anybody.”
Be calm, Cass. Be the boring wife who buys things off TikTok Shop.“My friend Janie has been taking them for like a year. She told me about them at brunch. I thought, sure, why not, what’s the harm? They’re cheap, they’re at CVS, it’s not like?—”
“Get over here.”
I freeze.
“What?”
“I said, Get over here, Cassandra. Now.”
My feet don’t want to move, but they do. I cross the dressing area in the towel. Water is still dripping from my hair down the back of my neck and between my shoulder blades.
I stop maybe three feet from him.
He shakes his head. “Closer.”
I step closer.
He shakes the bottle. The capsules rattle inside. “Look me in the eye and tell me again what these are for.”
“Hair,” I whisper. “And nails.”
He takes a step into my space. I don’t take a step back, even though every cell in my body is screaming at me to. HIs righthand is still tight around the bottle. Not balled up and flying at my face. Not yet, at least.
