Chapter 10
The chairman swore under his breath.
Ben ignored him.
“You don’t know what Clara intends. You don’t know what she wants made public. And you don’t get to turn her worst night into your redemption campaign.”
That hurt.
Which meant it was probably useful.
I nodded.
“No statement.”
The chairman pushed back from the table.
“This company cannot survive you discovering morality in real time.”
Cole Urban had not been healthy before the scandal.
That was another truth I had hidden beneath expensive marble.
Two years earlier, we had expanded too quickly.
I wanted a landmark project on every skyline that mattered.
Manchester.
Birmingham.
London.
Then another London tower because one had not felt like enough.
Interest rates changed.
Construction costs climbed.
A major deal collapsed.
I responded the way I responded to fear.
I became louder.
I borrowed more.
I promised investors a recovery.
I treated doubt like betrayal.
And I stayed later at the office.
Clara had been pregnant through much of it.
She would come to bed after midnight and find my side empty.
Sometimes she came downstairs and stood in the doorway of my study.
“Are you coming up?”
“In ten minutes.”
Ten minutes became an hour.
An hour became another night where we slept beside each other without touching.
One evening, about two months before Noah was born, she sat across from me at breakfast.
“We don’t talk anymore.”
“We’re talking now.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’ve got a financing call.”
“You always have a call.”
“It’s my job.”
“And what am I?”
I remember looking at her.
Actually looking.
She was seven months pregnant.
Tired.
Beautiful in a way I had stopped noticing because beauty that belonged to me had become background.
“You’re my wife.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
At the time I had been annoyed.
Now I understood the question.
She had not been asking for a title.
She had been asking for a place in my life.
I had given her one in the apartment.
One in photographs.
One beside me at charity dinners.
But not in my decisions.
Sabrina entered my life during that period.
At an industry event.
I had just spent an hour pretending a troubled development was performing beautifully.
She approached me afterward.
“You’re a very convincing liar.”
I should have been insulted.
Instead, I smiled.
“So are you.”
“That’s why I charge for it.”
She made me laugh.