Chapter 2
Chapter Two
“You’ve refolded that three times,” Lillian observed as she finished re-tying her signature braid. “Something on your mind?”
It was laundry night: Lillian had her neat stack of socks, Bea was wrangling towels and linens. The fitted sheet, though, was a sentient spiral of disrespect.
“I learned today that Rafael’s final promotion isn’t to husband. It’s to owner.” Her hands went numb as she said it. He’d always been possessive, and she liked that more than she’d ever admit. But it was different when it was state-sanctioned.
Lillian’s hands stilled on a pair of pantyhose. “Like Tier Four?”
Bea sat on the couch. “Yeah, but with a software upgrade I didn’t ask for: more coverage and fewer permissions.” Her knee bounced once, then twice, then threatened to start a rhythm section. “And here’s the part that makes me crazy. I should have known. I could have known.”
Lils watched her with those too-knowing brown eyes. “Because of last time.”
Ancient history, when she’d tipped into Tier Four of the Social Proximity Law by accidentally spending one too many nights over. She’d found herself staring at a sterile government notice informing her she now had a ‘linked party’ and saw that this country didn’t treat intimacy as casual.
Bea glanced down. Her socks were covered in strawberries. Adorable, oblivious strawberries that she resented for being so naive. “I didn’t investigate. I acted like I wasn’t living in the UR and fell in love with a boy and accepted this stupid, stunning ring.”
Her hand drifted down. She twisted at it, enough to break the seal of warmth, then slid it off and set it on the coffee table between them. The blue diamond and its white wings caught the light.
Lillian’s gaze dropped briefly to the jewelry. “Do you think he wouldn’t marry you if you said no to the law?”
Bea dropped her face into her hands. “I don’t know.”
“Should we call Georgie?”
Georgina Ashcroft. Legacy darling. Former housemate. Traitor.
Bea’s head whipped up. “She didn’t tell me.”
“And you’re allowed to be mad about that.”
Bea’s eyes narrowed. “Isabel and Naomi, too.”
The realization came as she said it. Outnumbered. Not by men, but by women who were supposed to be on her side. They’d known what it would cost her, and they had decided, through their silence, she would pay that price.
Lillian didn’t rush to defend them. “Why don’t we call and let them try to explain?”
The idea was both comforting and terrifying. Comforting because Georgina could make anything sound manageable. Terrifying because Georgina could make anything sound manageable.
Lillian tapped her screen, then angled it toward Bea. “Video?”
Bea blew her hair off her face. “Fine.”
The screen rang twice before Georgina appeared, lying against her tufted velvet headboard, blonde hair still immaculately styled.
“Ladies.” Georgina’s face lit up. She shifted the phone, and Isabel appeared beside her, half reclined, lifting two fingers in salute.
“Sleepover?” Lillian asked. Georgie and Isabel were now Southgate residents, the creative enclave of stages and studios, an hour from the corporate bustle of Northgate.
“Dante and Hunter are working, so we met to gossip,” Isabel said, lifting a single chip between two freshly manicured fingers.
“Bey,” Georgie said, peering at the screen, “why do you look like you just learned about withholding tax?”
“Wait,” Lillian interrupted. “I’m going to add Naomi. One sec.”
A beat later Naomi appeared, hair damp like she’d just showered. Her cheerful greeting faded when she took in Bea. “What’s wrong?”
“Rafael explained the marriage law to me today.” Bea waited for horror, or at least a little embarrassment. There was none.
Isabel gathered her hair onto one shoulder. “Ah.”
Georgina, for once, didn’t make a joke.
Naomi studied Bea like someone deciding how much truth she could survive. “It’s confronting the first time you hear about it.”
“Confronting is a meeting invite,” Bea muttered. “This is…I don’t know if I disappear slowly, or all at once.”
It wasn’t that the law gave him something; it was that it took it from her.
“When you’re raised outside this system, ownership doesn’t sound protective,” Lillian murmured. “It sounds final.”
“It is,” Isabel said, matter-of-fact. “That’s the design.”
Bea stood. The movement surprised even her. Her body had already decided to withdraw. She crossed four steps toward the hallway, then halted, turning partway back. “Why do you say that like it’s normal?”
“You’re imagining a bad man in the system,” Naomi said, voice echoing in the tiled room.
“And you’re telling me there has never been one?” Bea shot back.
“Are you imagining Rafael is going to be that one?” Isabel challenged.
“I don’t know.” Bea sighed. Nobody walked down an aisle thinking they were choosing wrong. The law expected her to trust every version of him he might become. “I don’t know how anyone’s supposed to know that.”
“What you need to figure out is if this is a dealbreaker for you,” Naomi advised.
Lillian’s eyes darted back down to the ring on their coffee table.
“I don’t know,” Bea said.
“You don’t know?” Naomi picked up her phone, brought it to her face. “Did you stop loving him?”
“Of course not. I think about him constantly. Sometimes I feel him right before I hear from him. I just—this is insane.” She shook her head. “Why didn’t any of you warn me?”
There it was. She couldn’t school the hurt that cracked through her voice. Lillian covered Bea’s hand with hers. That small kindness hit too hard, and she blinked back sudden tears.
“Because you would have run,” Naomi said ruthlessly.
“And it wasn’t our place,” added Isabel.
“So you let me walk into it blind to protect your culture?”
“No, Bey,” Georgie said. “To protect your relationship.”
Bea stared at the faces of women she trusted. Something in her hardened. She sniffed. “I have to go.”
The email arrived mid-afternoon, wedged between a meeting summary and a coffee order form.
RE: Agricultural Development Fund Review Resolution
Following audit proceedings, Mr. Gavin Trenor has resigned from his position, citing health reasons. The Ministry thanks Monaghan & Stowe for its cooperation.
Bea read it twice, blinked, then forwarded it to Jaxon Dao with one line: Did we do that? Her phone rang thirty seconds later.
“Apparently we did,” he said. “Congratulations. We’re lethal now.”
All they had done was follow the paper trail. It ended with six girls’ stipends quietly diverted and Trenor’s easy certainty that those families didn’t matter much, anyway.
Bea stared at her monitor. “It’s not funny. I thought they’d fix it. Adjust the payments. Not…this.”
“It’s how these things go,” Jaxon explained. She could hear keyboard clicks in the background, like he was running numbers even while talking. “He’ll ‘step back for health reasons,’ take a few months off, maybe resurface somewhere less important. Quiet exile.”
“So not jail.”
“No. But a permanent asterisk.”
“Do you think he’s angry at us?” Bea asked, tapping her pen against her notepad.
“We didn’t fire him.” Jaxon sounded unbothered. “We reported the variance.”
She swiveled in her chair, eyes unfocused on the skyline. “A variance that blew up a very comfortable life.”
“Trenor made his choices.”
“I suppose.”
“You good for lunch tomorrow?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t miss it.” A petty voice in her mind said that once she and Rafael were married she might not be allowed to have lunch with Jaxon anymore.
“Twelve at the usual.”
She ended the call and sat still, imagining Gavin packing up a desk he probably thought he’d retire at. But of course Jaxon was right—he’d made his bed.
Bea closed the email, and lifted her head. The floor had been waiting.
A cluster had formed three desks down, bodies angled toward one another, heads bent. Someone else leaned back in their chair just far enough to have a clear sightline to Bea’s left hand. Another pretended to refill a water bottle.
“Guys,” Bea said dryly.
“Okay, no,” said Mikaela, one of the analysts she’d started with, abandoning all pretense. “We’re not moving on from that rock.”
“Seriously, Bea,” Cheryl, one of the leads in the marketing team, added. “Do you even know what that is?”
Despite the existential threat that now loomed around this very ring, she was amused. “A ring. We covered this three days ago.”
“My research tells me that’s La Vérité Bleue,” Belinda, also from marketing, said reverently.
Bea frowned. “How do you know that?”
A beat. Then overlapping answers.
“Because it disappeared from the French circuit.”
“Because it’s on a list of blue diamonds that are tracked, and it was tracked to the UR.”
“No one thought it would actually surface on a finger.”
“I heard it was brought back here personally.” Amelia, a newer intern, looked ready to faint.
“Five and a half carats is already insane, but if that’s the Bleue it would be worth—”
“Why,” Maris Chen said crisply, materializing like a corrective force, “is half my floor conducting a Sotheby’s appraisal instead of working?”
The group scattered, but not before a few whispered, “Congrats again, Bea.”
“We’ll tell you more at lunch.”
People drifted back to their desks, the conversations going subterranean.
“Cruz.” Maris puckered her mouth. “For now I’ll keep calling you that. Upstairs wants to talk to you.”
“Right now?”
“Not this minute, don’t panic.”
“I wasn’t panicking,” Bea denied. “Okay. Maybe a little.”
“You and Jaxon Dao provided critical commentary to the Gavin Trenor situation.” Maris’ expression turned wry. “And you’ve been here long enough to know we reward good work with more work.”
“The purest form of validation.”
“The spoiler,” Maris said. “So you don’t squeal and embarrass me. Promotion. With a pay rise, if that still matters to you.”
Bea sprang up from her chair, hands lifting in a reflexive, irrepressible burst of triumph. “Yes!”
Maris’ expression was enough.