Page 29 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

"It is. We're fairly sure it's them." He was quiet a moment, but I knew he meant Brighton. "Doesn't make it easier to fight. And Maddie, off the record, just between us. The father's real. Edward Playne is really in the ICU. Whatever Brighton's doing with it, there's a real man on a ventilator in the middle of it, and that's the part that keeps me awake. You can't spin a man on a ventilator."

"Does Damon know that's the part that matters?"

Mark didn't answer that, which was an answer.

Damon came home after nine, gray, ten years older than he'd looked at breakfast. He poured himself a drink and didn't touch it, just held the glass like a thing to do with his hands.

"We have to push the trip," he said.

I'd known before he said it. It still stung. "Okay."

"It's not okay, I know it isn't. The second the trial reads out clean, we go, I swear to you. But I can't be in another country with my phone off while this is happening. You have to see that."

"I do see it." I crossed the room and put my hand on his arm. I wanted to be on his side. I'd spent the whole day wanting to be on his side. "I'm not angry about the trip. The trip was never the thing." It was true. "I'm worried about you. You haven't slept since the gala. You're carrying this like it's going to break you in half, and maybe two weeks out of the country is exactly what you need. To get far enough back to actually think."

"There's nothing to step back from. I have to be in it. Stepping back is how you lose."

"And what if being in it is the wrong instinct?" I kept my voice careful, because I could feel the edge under us. "What if all of this, the woman, her father, the trial dragging on and on, what if it's the world trying to tell you something? What if the right thing, the human thing, is to pull the drug. Just pause it. Until you know for certain no one else ends up on a machine."

He went very still. When he looked at me there was nothing warm left in his face.

"Pull the drug?"

"I'm saying if there is any chance at all that it's real, then one man's life is worth more than one quarter."

"Do you have the faintest idea what you're asking me?" His voice was low, and dropping lower. "Eighteen months. Two thousand jobs. Eight years of my life, my father's name on the front of the building, and you want me to set fire to every bit of it because Brighton paid a grieving woman to crash my gala? That is not the human thing, Maddie. That is the selfish thing. That's you wanting the easy exit so we can go look at paintings in Amsterdam and pretend the year never happened. I expected better from you. You of all people, I thought you understood what this costs me."

His words went off like a bomb inside me. I knew he was upset. Stressed out and angry and he had every right to be. If the drugs were unsafe, Damon wasn't the one who'd made them so, but this… this was on him.

And this was how he saw me. He thought this was about paintings?

"You don't get to call me selfish," I said, very quietly. "Not you. Not this year. Not after everything I've swallowed to keep your life smooth enough that you could forget I was even in it."

He didn't answer. He set the untouched glass down hard enough that it slopped over his hand, and he took his keys, and he walked out. The engine turned over in the drive. The headlights swung across the kitchen wall, and then they were gone, and the house was as quiet as it had been the night I locked the guest-room door.

I stood there a long time. The three good weeks had been a held breath, the whole house holding it with me, and I'd let myself believe holding a breath was the same as healing. He'd just let it out. Everything underneath was sitting exactly where it had always been, waiting for me to stop pretending I couldn't see it.

19

DAMON

Ihadn't slept properly in four days, and the follow-up event was the night that decided whether the company survived its worst month. It was also the first time I'd be in front of the press since Raina Playne had crashed the gala.

A ballroom of our biggest investors. A livestream to every employee on every floor. Press in the back, the ones we'd chosen to let in, because the story we needed told required witnesses.

I got up and said we'd been attacked, that the independent trial was the answer, that anyone betting against Sterling was betting against the data and the data would win. I laid out the facts, plain as day. Edward Playne had been on the medication for only a couple of weeks when he'd had his event, and he'd had a history of cardiac distress and plaque build-up that accumulated over decades, not weeks. That correlation, however unfortunate, did not equal causation and any attempt to pretend it did was not only unscientific but financially motivated by our opposition.

I had the room inside ten minutes and held it for forty, and when I came off the stage the applause had the sound of money deciding to stay another quarter.

Maddie was there, because Maddie was always there. The designer dress that hugged her beautiful curves, the public smile, working the floor while I worked the podium. Somewhere under the exhaustion I felt the dull gratitude you feel for a floor holding you up, which is to say none at all. She knew every name in the room.

She made three hundred frightened people feel personally reassured by the Sterling family, without a script, and I'd had eight years of it and never once thanked her in a way that cost me anything. I'd filed my wife under handled, like the catering, like the valet.

I should have seen it coming. Emily and Maddie in the same room on the same bad night, one of them armed and one of them not. I didn't see it because I wasn't looking at either of them. I was looking at Diane Meadows, who was three hundred million dollars in a green dress, and money was the only thing I could see by then.

It happened at the bar. Diane, her husband, the features writer I should have kept out of the building, and Maddie in the middle of them with Diane's hand held in both of hers, doing the thing she did. I came up on the tail of it.

"...heartbroken for that poor woman and her father, of course we are," Maddie was saying, warm, certain, the cluster's temperature dropping two degrees the way it always did around her. "Damon hasn't slept over it. He would never knowingly let a soul come to harm, I promise you. We'll do whatever we can to help."