5. Liam
— ? —
Liam
The door is still swinging when Angelina finishes the sentence.
“She’s finally gone, I mean.” She crosses to my desk the way she used to, as though the last few months never happened and we’re picking up where we left off.
“I heard about the papers. Everyone’s heard, actually.
Word travels fast when a Sharpe gets divorced after, what was it, barely three weeks? ”
I don’t respond. The vitamin bottle is still in my hand, label facing up, Solenn’s name printed in neat pharmaceutical letters. I can’t seem to put it down.
“It’s probably for the best, honestly.” Angelina settles onto the edge of my desk, one leg crossed over the other, getting comfortable in a space that was never hers. “She was never right for you. A front-desk girl who got lucky and got pregnant? She’s a liability for people like us.”
Liability.
That’s the word you use for a clause you strike out of a contract. For a risk somebody prices and manages and writes down. She’s chosen it for a woman who spent two weeks fixing other people’s disasters so this company could raise money with the lights on.
“We were so good together, remember?” Her voice drops into the register she kept for the things she wanted. “Before she complicated things. I still think about it. About us.”
She leans closer and the perfume arrives ahead of her. Expensive, carefully chosen, nothing at all like the coconut shampoo that used to fill my bathroom, the cheap drugstore stuff Solenn wouldn’t let me replace because she said it reminded her of her childhood home.
“The way you used to be with me.” Angelina’s hand lands on the desk, inches from mine. “The things we used to do in this office. Remember that night after the big deal closed? The way you-”
“Stop.”
“Liam.” She laughs, knowing. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. We had something real. Something that made sense. Not like this… situation you talked yourself into.”
The memory is supposed to land as seduction. Late nights and locked doors and the kind of heat that burns fast and leaves nothing standing. She’s banking on history, on muscle memory, on the assumption that losing Solenn will send me running back to the last place I was comfortable.
It lands as disgust.
The woman perched on my desk has arranged herself carefully, warmth measured out in the eyes, angle chosen, and nothing in me answers except cold.
“You’re fired.”
She laughs, bright and certain, the way you laugh at a joke you don’t quite follow. “What?”
“Clear out your desk by end of business.”
“Liam.” The laugh fades. Her eyebrows draw together. “You can’t be serious.”
“Your work was never the problem, Angelina.” I look at her properly for the first time since she came through the door, and there it is, exactly what Solenn must have seen every time the two of them were in a room.
The proprietary hand. The absolute certainty that she belonged here and Solenn didn’t. “What you just said about my wife is.”
“Your wife?” The smile flickers, then resets into a shape with no warmth in it at all. “She filed for divorce, Liam. She’s not your wife anymore. She’s just some girl who-”
“Get out.”
“You’re being ridiculous.” She stands, but she doesn’t move toward the door.
“I’m trying to help you. Everyone is whispering about this, do you understand that?
The boardroom, the break rooms, every floor of this building.
They’re all talking about how Liam Sharpe married some nobody and she walked out before the ink was dry on the license. ”
“I don’t care what they’re saying.”
“You should. Your reputation-”
“My reputation is not your concern.”
“It was my concern for two years.” Her voice climbs, and the mask goes with it.
“Two years of standing beside you at every event, every gala, every mind-numbing dinner with investors who couldn’t stop staring at my chest. I earned my place in this company, Liam.
I earned my place in your life. And then she shows up with her sad eyes and her knocked-up sob story, and suddenly I’m supposed to pretend that’s reasonable?
That you choosing her over me made any kind of sense? ”
The vitamin bottle creaks in my grip.
“You didn’t choose her because you loved her.
” Angelina steps closer, her voice dropping into a register meant to pass for sympathy.
“You chose her because you felt guilty. Because you were raised to sign your name to your own messes and you couldn’t stand to be the man who writes a check and walks.
But she’s gone now. The problem solved itself. You can stop pretending.”
“I’m not pretending.”
“Of course you are. You’ve been pretending since the day you put a ring on her finger.” She reaches out, touches my arm. “I know you, Liam. Better than she ever did. We were together for two years. And I know that what you felt for her wasn’t love. It was obligation. It was-”
“Get out.”
“Liam-”
“I said get out.”
Her hand comes back fast. Then she stares at me, running the numbers again and arriving somewhere she doesn’t like at all.
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Maybe.”
“She’s not coming back. You know that, right? She didn’t leave you a forwarding address, she left you a court date. And here you are, holding onto a bottle of vitamins like it means something, firing people who actually care about you because they said the quiet part out loud.”
“The quiet part.”
“That she was never good enough.” Angelina’s voice goes cold. “That she didn’t belong here. That everyone could see it except you, and now the whole thing is collapsing exactly the way it was always going to collapse.”
I set the vitamin bottle down, square in the middle of the blotter, and stand up.
“End of business. Your desk. I won’t say it again.”
“You can’t fire me for this.”
“I can fire you for whatever I want. It’s my name on the building.”
“Your mother-”
“Is not the CEO.” I come around the desk, and she takes a step back. Good. “I am. And I’m telling you that your employment here is terminated, effective immediately. HR will have your severance paperwork ready within the hour.”
“This is insane.”
“This is consequence.” I open the door. “You said my wife was a liability. You said she got lucky. You said she wasn’t good enough, in my office, to my face.” My hand tightens on the doorknob. “You’re showing me exactly who you are.”
She holds there. The mask is gone now, she’s just furious.
“Two years,” she says. “And it ends over a girl who couldn’t be bothered to fight for you.”
“She fought for those few months. Nobody was watching.”
She collects her bag, smooths her skirt, and takes one last look around the office, cataloging what she’s walking out of.
“You know what the worst part is?” She pauses in the doorway. “She left you. She walked out and filed for divorce and disappeared without a word, and you’re still defending her. You’re still calling her your wife. So pathetic.”
The door slams hard enough to rattle the frames on the wall.
The silence that follows is suffocating.
I stand in the middle of my office, staring at the door, listening to the echo of her heels fade down the hallway. My hand is shaking. I don’t know when that started.
The vitamin bottle sits on the desk where I left it. The only proof anywhere in this building that she and our child were ever real, and I let her walk out of my life because I was too busy to notice she was going.
Forty-three minutes pass.
I know because I’m watching the clock, waiting for the next disaster to announce itself.
Angelina won’t go quietly. She has too much pride for that, too much anger.
She’ll make calls. She’ll tell people her version of the story.
She’ll make sure everyone in this city knows that Liam Sharpe has lost his mind over a woman who didn’t even want him.
The whispers, the speculation, the quiet satisfaction of every person who called this a mistake from the first week. None of it costs me anything I haven’t already lost.
The only thing I care about is somewhere I can’t find, carrying my child, building a life with no room in it for me.
The door opens.
My mother doesn’t knock. She never has.
“You fired Angelina.”
“Yes.”
“For defending you.” Melanie crosses to the chair across from my desk and lowers herself into it. “For pointing out what everyone else is too polite to say.”
“Is that what she was doing?”
“That marriage was a mistake from the beginning, Liam. You know it. I know it. The only person who didn’t seem to understand was that girl, and now she’s finally done everyone a favor by removing herself.”
“Her name is Solenn.”
“Her name is irrelevant.” Melanie waves it away. “She was a complication. An obstacle. You should be grateful she’s giving you a way out.”
“Grateful.”
“Yes. Grateful.” She leans forward, her eyes steady on mine. “Now you can move on. Find someone suitable. Someone who understands what it means to be a Sharpe, instead of a girl who handed out name tags at one of my own events.”
“Solenn is my wife.”
“Solenn is an accident.” Her voice drops out of its careful register, and for a second the real thing shows through. “A problem I’ve been trying to solve since the day you called me from that penthouse and told me you’d gotten some nobody pregnant.”
Neither of us says anything for a moment.
I look at my mother. The makeup that never smudges. The hair that never moves. The controlled fury sitting under all of it, and beneath that the conviction that she has never once in her life been wrong about a person.
Twenty-eight years of trying to meet her standard.
Of being the son she had in mind. Of earning approval that arrived with conditions and could be withdrawn over one bad quarter.
I dated the women she approved of and ended the ones she didn’t, and I built an entire life around the question of what my mother would make of it.
Solenn never asked me to be anything except present.
And I couldn’t even manage that.
“She is my wife.” My voice comes out final. Harder than I’ve ever spoken to my mother in my life. “And you will not speak about her like that again.”
Melanie’s eyes widen. Just enough to tell me she heard it. Just enough to mark a line neither of us has crossed before.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“Liam.” She laughs, and there’s no warmth anywhere in it. “Don’t be dramatic. I’m trying to protect you. Do you have the first idea what this is going to cost?”
“Cost.”
“A pregnant wife, three weeks in, in this state.” She counts it off without needing to stop and think, which tells me she’s had the list for a while.
“Spousal support. A share of everything accumulated during the marriage, which in your case is a number with three commas in it. Child support calculated against your income and not hers, for eighteen years. And a very good lawyer explaining to her, slowly and in writing, exactly how much more she’s entitled to ask for once she understands what she married.
” She smooths her skirt over her knee. “That girl is going to take half of you. She’ll do it politely, over years, and you’ll thank her on the way out because you’ll be too guilty to argue. ”
“You don’t know that.”
She leans in. “Think about the timing, darling. Really think about it. She waits until the ring is on and the certificate is filed and the pregnancy is documented in a doctor’s own handwriting, and then she goes. Not even six months of knowing her.”
Something almost gentle comes into her voice, which is how I know it’s the worst thing she’s said yet.
“It is the shortest stretch that still looks like a marriage in front of a judge. She didn’t leave because she was unhappy, Liam. She left because she was finished. The paperwork was always the point.”
“Stop.”
Melanie sits back and lets her hands settle. “I have watched women do this since before you could walk. They are never in a hurry until the day they are.”
I don’t have an answer for her. All I can produce is silence. Because I don’t know if she’s wrong. Because in three weeks of marriage I never asked Solenn one single question that would have let me answer this.
“Your wife left you.” Every ounce of performance goes out of my mother’s voice.
“She packed her bags and disappeared without telling you where she was going. She hired a lawyer and filed papers before you even knew she was unhappy. Does that sound like someone who wants to be found? Does that sound like someone who wants you to fight for her?”
“It sounds like someone who was drowning while I stood there and watched.”
That stops her. Just for a moment.
“Don’t be maudlin. Whatever problems existed in that marriage, they were her problems. Her insecurities. Her inability to adapt to your world.”
“It was my world that broke her.”
“She was broken when she arrived.” Melanie stands.
“A nobody from nowhere with no family, no connections, no understanding of what she was walking into. I tried to warn you. I tried to tell you this would end badly. And now it has, exactly the way I predicted, and you’re sitting here defending her like she’s some kind of victim. ”
“She is a victim.”
“Of what? Marrying a billionaire? Living in a penthouse? Having access to everything money can buy?”
“Of me.” It comes out rough. “Of you. Of Angelina. Of every person in that ballroom who decided what she was before she ever opened her mouth.”
My mother takes her time with that. The recalculation behind her face is one I’ve watched my whole life, every time I stepped outside a line she drew.
Then she smiles. The smile that has never meant anything good.
“You’ll thank me, darling.”
“For what?”
“The divorce is already handled.” She collects her bag from the arm of the chair and settles it onto her shoulder. “I handled it.”