Page 8 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

"And to lead that effort," Damon went on, "to head Research and Development through this and everything that comes after, I've brought in someone whose name some of you will know. The finest research mind I have ever had the privilege of working beside and the only person I'd trust to help us in this next phase."

He turned, his hand lifting toward the glass doors, and I felt the night tilt before I understood why.

"Please welcome Sterling Pharmaceuticals' new Head of Research and Development. Dr. Emily Cavendash."

The doors opened.

And there she was—taller than I remembered, gold hair loose to her shoulders, blue eyes finding the platform and the man on it like the rest of the rooftop didn't exist. The champagne flute went cold and slick in my hand, and I stood exactly where the good wife stands, a half-step behind my husband, and smiled for the cameras while the floor fell out from under me.

5

MADDIE

She crossed the deck like she'd walked it a thousand times.

Emily Cavendash moved through the crowd in a column of midnight blue, and the journalists parted for her the way water parts for something with a hull, and when she reached the platform she didn't look at the cameras at all. She looked at Damon. Up at him, with her chin tilted and a smile that knew exactly how it photographed, and he reached down and took her hand to help her up the single step she didn't need help with.

His fingers closed around hers. Hers around his.

The flashbulbs went off in a wall of white.

"Dr. Cavendash comes to us from the frontier of cardiac pharmacology," Damon was saying, and his voice had warmed by a degree I'd have known anywhere, the degree he saved for the things he actually wanted. "There is no one I trust more to put this question to bed. No one."

"He's being generous." Emily laughed, low, leaning toward the bank of microphones with the ease of a woman who'd done a hundred of these. "Or he's forgotten how many arguments we used to lose to each other at two in the morning over a stack of journals and very bad coffee."

Laughter rolled across the rooftop, fond and easy, and Damon laughed with them, and for one suspended second the two of them stood in the gold light I had ordered hung, framed by the flowers I had chosen, and they looked like exactly what the picture said they were.

A couple. The kind of couple a company is built around. The kind that ends up on the cover of a magazine, the pharma power pair, his certainty and her brilliance, his name and her hands.

I stood a half-step behind and to the side, where the good wife stands, and I smiled, and the champagne flute sweated cold against my palm, and I watched my husband's mouth as he turned his head toward her to catch something she'd murmured, and I understood that I had spent the morning on the phone making certain not one single flower was out of place for this.

For this.

"How long have you and Mr. Sterling known each other?" a journalist called.

"University," Emily said, smooth as glass. "A very long time. Some things you don't forget."

And she looked at Damon when she said it.

And he didn't correct her, didn't redirect, didn't glance back at me to fold me into the frame the way he might have. He let it sit. He let the whole rooftop watch it sit, the warmth of it, the history of it, and the photographers caught all of it, every frame, and somewhere in this city tomorrow it would run beside the words independent trial and finest research mind and known each other a very long time.

I felt the smile holding on my face like I'd nailed it there.

He hadn't told me.

That was the part that found the soft place under my ribs and pressed. Eight years of texts about cufflinks and seating charts and what tie went with what shirt, eight years of being told about every little detail before the dry cleaner was, before his own family half the time, and this—the woman, the name, the announcement that would reshape the company and stand on the stage I'd built—this he'd kept. He'd let me drive myself across the city in black Ferragamo armor to find out at the same moment as the man from Bloomberg.

The rooftop tilted, a slow degree. The lights smeared at their edges. I made myself breathe through my nose, slow, the way you breathe to keep from being sick, and I fixed my eyes on the back of Damon's collar and counted the threads.

"Maddie." Curtis, materialized at my elbow, his voice pitched for me alone. His hand came to my arm, light. "Hey. You're white as the tablecloths. You all right?"

"I'm fine." It came out even. I was proud, distantly, of how even. "I'm fine. I just need some air."

He looked at me, then around at the open deck, the city wind moving the loose strands at my temple, the whole sky of it overhead.

"Maddie," he said gently. "We're on a rooftop."

"I know."