Page 13 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

The quiet stretched long enough that I heard her set something down.

"What happened?" she asked. Not teasing now.

I looked at the canvas, the cool north light lying flat across the white of it.

"Damon hired Emily Cavendash," I said. "His college girlfriend. 'The one that got away.' As his new head of R&D. He announced it last night at the launch, in front of three hundred people, and I found out the same second the reporters did."

Ellie was quiet for a moment. When she spoke the warmth in her voice had gone hard at the edges.

"That son of a bitch."

"Ellie."

"No. I get this one. I've been thinking it for eight years, I've just been polite enough not to say it to your face." She let out a shaky breath. "Are you okay?"

"No," I said, and the relief of speaking the truth made my throat ache around it. "But I'd like to come anyway. Maybe especially."

"Tomorrow." She said it fast, like she was afraid I'd take it back. "Eleven. I'll have coffee waiting, and just because it's too late for you to present at the show doesn't mean you can't come."

I thought about it for a few seconds. About the investor dinner and all the Sterling fires I had to put out between now and then.

"You know what? Put me down. I'm going."

"Ooh, I like this new Maddie," she said, and I could hear her smile through the phone. "Bring her around now and again."

I couldn't help but laugh. "You might be seeing her more than you think."

8

DAMON

The forty-eighth floor had rearranged itself around Emily Cavendash inside of a week, and I told myself that was just what it was going to take to right this sinking ship.

She'd taken the corner office two doors down from mine, the one that had sat dark since Milton left, and by Wednesday there was a whiteboard in it filled edge to edge with that cramped slanting handwriting I'd have known in my sleep, and a row of abandoned coffee cups along the sill, because some things a person doesn't outgrow. People found reasons to walk that stretch of hallway who'd never had business on it before. I'd caught myself doing it twice.

My father had stopped by once or twice to check on the new hire, too. In the beginning, he'd been as wary of Emily as he had the day I'd brought her home, but after the early press she was bringing to Sterling, he'd evidently decided she was acceptable as the new head of R&D. Just not as his son's girlfriend.

But even he couldn't deny, the work was good. That was the reason I'd brought her on, after all.

No matter what Maddie thought. Or the press. It was hard to convince your wife that there was nothing going on between you and the new hire when the media was having a field day.

I told myself it was a distraction from the Brighton debacle, and that was what mattered.

Thursday we sat on opposite sides of her desk for three hours over a discrepancy buried in the phase-two numbers, a cluster of cardiac readings that ran two points high in one cohort and nowhere else, the exact kind of thing the lab's hatchet job would have lived on if they'd found it. I'd been ready to call it a transcription error and move on. Emily wouldn't let it go.

"Errors don't cluster," she said, tapping the line. "They scatter. This is leaning on something."

"It's a rounding artifact."

She pulled the cohort metadata without looking up. "Everything in that cluster was drawn between four and six in the afternoon. After the second dose, after lunch, after caffeine. It's not the drug, Damon, it's the clock. Their lab took readings at a time of day that runs hot and didn't control for it."

I looked at the timestamps. She was right. She was completely right, and she'd seen it in an afternoon. I felt the relief of working beside someone who arrived already at the answer, who didn't need me to explain why a problem mattered before she'd solve it.

"You're staring," she said.

"I'm supervising."

"That's what my father used to call it when he watched me do my own homework."