Page 107 of Discretion at Its Finest

I didn’t have the energy to lift my head at first. Then my office door eased open, and warm light spilled inside.

Cheryl walked in like she owned the place, baby perched on her hip, hair perfect, perfume faint but expensive. The picture of domestic softness… the picture of a woman who believed she belonged here.

“Guess who woke up from her nap?” she chimed, bouncing Marissa gently. “Say,hi, Daddy.”

I forced the muscles in my face to lift.

“Hi, sweetheart.” My voice softened automatically, switching into the role I’d played for years now.

Marissa cooed again, hand reaching for me, but I turned back to my desk and the drink I was nursing. Cheryl’s eyes fell on the chaos.

“…Long night?” she asked gently, eyes flicking to the piles of documents she definitely shouldn’t have been looking at.

“Just working,” I muttered, shutting the folder as Marissa babbled softly once again.

“Greg… you can’t keep doing this, sitting in here every night until dawn. You haven’t slept. You barely eat—”

“I’m fine,” I bit out.

“You’re not,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re running yourself to the ground.” Her eyes softened. “This isn’t your fault.”

A bitter laugh scraped out of me. A person could only hear the same rhetoric a million times before going fucking insane. “It’s everyone’s fault but mine, right?”

She hesitated, just a second. But I caught it. That tiny flicker of doubt. That crack in her perfectly constructed support. The same cracks I saw in my father and in Genevieve.

It pissed me off.

“Greg…” she tried again. “You know that’s not what I mean… You’ve been carrying this alone. All of it. And that’s not fair.” She shifted Marissa on her hip, her voice going softer. “You did everything you could, Greg. You showed up. You tried to hold it together. The person who blew it up is sitting in prison right now.”

I stared at her. She believed maybe half of that. The rest was a performance… the same performance I’d been putting on foryears, same one Genevieve had put on… just coming from the other direction now.

I picked up my glass.

“Sure,” I said quietly, and she let out another sigh. “Things will get better. We’ll get through this. As a family.”

Family.

The word sat wrong inside me.

I glanced at Marissa, her fist wrapped in Cheryl’s hair, cheeks rosy from sleep. The daughter I gave attention to constantly, held like she was sacred, babied like she was the world to me.

…And then there was Eugene.

A knot formed in the pits of my stomach. “Where’s Genevieve?” I asked, trying to ignore it.

Cheryl’s expression faltered for the smallest moment. “Sleeping, I think. She’s been tired.”

Tired and pregnant. Cheryl wasn’t a fan of that. My relationship to Genevieve was purely PR in her perspective, given she and I had been together before Gen came into the picture.

It was supposed to be for the face of the company, but then Eugene was born, Genevieve got pregnant again, and for the life of me, I would probably never hear the end of me putting Cheryl second to my so-called fiancée.The irony of it all.

In an instant, her expression changed, back to perfect. “I’ll get this one into the bath and start on dinner soon. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.”

I didn’t say anything as the door clicked shut behind her. The silence rushed back in, and I sank deeper into the chair. I kept waiting, hoping for things to settle back into the way things were before shit hit the fan. The Trust collapsing, the federal raid… Before Reid walked back into our lives like he had any right.

He started showing up everywhereshewas. Eugene started gravitating toward him like it was instinct. My fiancée, thewoman I was supposed to marry, was now a different person entirely.

I let out a humorless breath.