Chapter 7
“Of course she did.”
Carter continued walking.
“I had dinner prepared.”
The house smelled faintly of cedar and coffee.
Everything was exactly as I had left it months earlier, from the cream throw blanket folded across the living-room sofa to the stack of reports beside the fireplace.
No Khloe.
No Harrison.
No argument waiting inside the kitchen.
I stood in the middle of the foyer and listened.
Nothing.
The silence felt enormous.
Then it felt safe.
My phone vibrated repeatedly inside my tote.
I had blocked Harrison, but mutual friends apparently had not received the message.
The first text came from Jenna, one of the women Harrison and I used to have dinner with.
I’m sorry.
I had no idea he and Khloe were serious.
The second arrived from Mark, one of Harrison’s college friends.
Heard what happened.
That’s brutal.
Hope you’re holding up.
Then another.
And another.
By the time I reached my bedroom, I had eight messages from people suddenly concerned about the woman they had watched being humiliated in public for months.
I put the phone down.
I did not answer any of them.
That night, I showered, changed into dark trousers and a cashmere sweater, ate half a bowl of soup under Carter’s supervision, and entered my office at eight fifty-five.
At nine, thirty-two faces appeared across three large screens.
New York.
London.
Singapore.
Zurich.
Toronto.
Tokyo.
San Francisco.
The men and women looking back at me did not see Harrison’s abandoned wife.
They saw the chairwoman.
“Good evening,” I said.
The room went quiet.
We began.
For the next two hours, my divorce ceased to exist.
We discussed the market debut of Meridian Axis, the technology infrastructure company whose early financing round I had entered six years earlier.
My initial position had once looked speculative.
Harrison had called it one of my “nerd bets.”
The public offering had changed that.
Its valuation had surged.
My original investment was now worth almost forty times what I paid.
The increase pushed Vance Global Holdings across a threshold we had known was approaching.
Our portfolio now included controlling or strategically decisive positions in thirty publicly listed companies around the world.
The combined value attributed to my holdings, private assets, property, and liquid investments had crossed ten billion dollars.
Carter had placed the updated figure in the briefing packet.
$10.08 billion.
I stared at the number longer than I expected.