Chapter 5
PLANNING THE PERFORMANCE OF A LIFETIME
“Smile, Nadia. Chin up just a—perfect.”
The photographer fires off six shots. Reid’s arm is around my waist, his thumb pressing into the fabric of my dress right above my hip bone.
Firm. Proprietary. The step-and-repeat banner behind us has his face on it twelve feet tall, and the real version is three inches from my ear, murmuring through his teeth without moving his lips.
“The Harmon guy at ten o’clock—gray suit. He’s on the fence about the platinum sponsorship. Laugh like I said something funny.”
I laugh. The photographer loves it. Gorgeous. One more.
Reid steers me off the mark and straight into a cluster of suits. “Dave Harmon! Great to see you.” His hand shifts from my waist to the small of my back. Pressure. Direction. I am a prop on a dolly.
“Nadia, Dave is the CEO of BrightPath Health. They’ve been incredible partners.”
“So wonderful to meet you.” I extend my hand. Dave takes it. My fingers are cold—they’ve been cold for weeks, a low-grade tremor that starts somewhere around my sternum and migrates outward—and Dave frowns slightly at my grip.
“Cold hands, warm heart,” I say. The line arrives from somewhere automatic, the part of my brain that’s been generating pleasantries for fifteen years on zero input from the rest of me.
“Dave, let me tell you about the transparency segment,” Reid says, launching into his pitch.
I stand beside him and hold my clutch against my thigh and feel the weight of the USB drive through the leather.
I haven’t let the drive out of my sight since I compiled all the evidence.
I’ve started dreaming about it—a small, dark rectangle that hums against my skin like a second pulse.
Dave asks about the Summit format. Reid explains. A woman in a navy cocktail dress appears at Dave’s elbow—his wife, or his date, or his handler. She turns to me while the men talk projections.
“I watched your husband’s special last month,” she says. “The one about emotional honesty? I turned to my sister and said, ‘that man gets it.’ Like, really gets it.”
“He’s passionate about the work.” My mouth is running the software on its own. I could do this in my sleep. I have done this in my sleep—jolting awake at three in the morning mid-sentence, rehearsing the brand even in dreams.
“And you can tell it’s real,” she says, touching my arm. “The way he talks about your marriage—you can’t fake that kind of connection.”
“No,” I say. “You really can’t.”
A waiter passes and I reach for a glass of wine, and my hand is shaking badly enough that the glass chatters against the tray when I lift it.
Reid glances at me. Keeps talking.
I take a sip. Set the glass down on the nearest high-top. Leave it there.
An hour later, the reception is thinning and my jaw aches from the inside out. I’m standing by the windows, making myself look contemplative instead of unhinged, when Reid materializes beside me.
“You’re quiet tonight.”
“I’m tired.”
“You’ve been tired for weeks.” He studies my face with the clinical attention he usually reserves for camera-blocking sessions. “Are you nervous about Saturday?”
My throat closes. Saturday. The Summit. The stage. The twenty-five thousand seats and two million livestream viewers and the USB drive that’s been burning a hole in my pocket.
“A little,” I say.
“Honey.” He puts his hand on my arm. The gentleness is so unexpected that my eyes sting.
“You’ll be fine. It’s five minutes. You walk out, you say some nice things about our marriage, you talk about how transparency has been the bedrock of what we’ve built.
The audience already loves you. Just be yourself. ”
Just be yourself. I almost laugh. He has no fucking idea what he’s asking for.
The version of myself that’s going to walk onto that stage on Saturday is someone he’s never met.
Someone I’ve never met. She’s been assembling herself in fury, and she’s nothing like the warm, approachable woman on the book covers.
“You’re right,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”
“That’s my girl.” He squeezes my arm and drops his hand and checks his phone in the same motion—a seamless transition from husband to brand manager, so practiced he doesn’t even register the gear change.
At dinner—takeout containers on the island, Reid still buzzing from the reception—he pours himself wine and leans against the counter.
“This is going to be the biggest one yet,” he says.
“The Trust Summit. Twenty-five thousand seats, sold out. Two million projected on the stream.” He takes a sip.
“I restructured the keynote. The transparency section moves to the middle—bigger impact. I do eight minutes on radical transparency, the audience is leaning in, and then I bring you out. ‘And now, you get to hear from the woman who’s lived these principles beside me for fifteen years.’ You come out, you do your five minutes, standing ovation, I close with the call to action. Clean.”
I separate my chopsticks. Snap them apart. One of them splits unevenly, a jagged edge running up the side.
“I think it’s my best theme,” he says.
“I think so too.”
His grin widens. He lifts his glass to me in a lazy toast and I tap my water against it, and the clink sounds like the pin sliding out of something.
Three days. I take a bite of pad thai and chew and chew and chew and the food has no taste and my hands are freezing under the warm container and the woman Reid is toasting doesn’t exist anymore.
She died in his office with her ear against a laptop speaker.
The woman holding these broken chopsticks is someone else entirely.
She terrifies me a little. I like that about her.
Caleb opens his apartment door and I can see the work on every surface—his laptop on the coffee table, a diagram of the arena’s audio system printed out and taped to the wall, sticky notes in his handwriting clustered around the routing chain.
He’s been preparing. Not casually, not as a favor.
The way you prepare for something that matters.
“Show me,” I say, dropping my jacket on a chair.
He pulls the laptop onto the coffee table and sits beside me on the couch. Close enough that I can smell his soap—something clean, unremarkable, completely unlike the cedar diffuser in Reid’s office that I can’t smell anymore without gagging.
“I tested the switch twice this week,” he says, tapping through a log on screen. “It works. Seamless cutover—the house speakers and the livestream pick up the new source at the same time.”
“Walk me through Saturday.”
“Reid does his keynote. The radical transparency section is in the middle—eight minutes. He finishes, introduces you, and you walk out. Take the mic.”
“And I give the speech. Transparency, our marriage, how it’s the bedrock of everything we’ve built.”
“Right. You give the speech he’s expecting.”
My palms press into my knees. The bones of my kneecaps push back. “And then?”
Caleb meets my eyes. “And then it happens.”
The laptop hums between us. The diagram on the wall is all arrows and boxes—the architecture of a sound system, or the architecture of an ending, depending on which direction you read it.
“His team will come for you,” I say. “After. When they figure out what you did.”
“I know.”
“You’ll lose the job. He’ll make sure you never work a broadcast gig in this city again.”
“Nadia.” He closes the laptop. Turns on the couch to face me.
“I’ve been working for a man who does that to women who come to him for help.
And then I watch his wife walk into the studio every week with her smile locked in place, holding the whole thing together, and I can’t—” He stops.
Exhales through his nose. “I can’t keep working for him now that I know this. ”
A silence settles between us. The traffic sounds from twenty stories down are faint and distant, another city happening to other people. Caleb leans forward, elbows on his knees.
“Nadia, I need to ask you something, and I’m not trying to talk you out of it.” His voice is careful. “Are you sure about this? Because once it starts, there’s no coming back. Not for him. Not for you either.”
My hands are trembling on my knees. I watch them shake—these hands that have been steady for twenty-one days, steady through three weeks of events and smiles and passing the salt to a man I’m about to incinerate. They’re done being steady. They’ve earned this shaking.
“This is all I’ve been thinking about,” I say.
“Every morning I wake up and it’s the first thing.
Every night I lie next to him and it’s the last thing.
I’m nervous. I’m scared. I keep imagining what twenty-five thousand faces look like when they—” My voice catches.
I swallow past it. “But people need to know who he really is. Those women needed someone to stop him, and nobody did, and he’s still seeing patients right now, Caleb.
Other women sit on that couch.” My jaw locks.
Unlocks. “I’m doing this. I’m going to show everyone what a hypocrite he is. ”
He nods. Not the quick, reflexive nod of someone being polite. A slow one, weighted with everything we’ve built together over the past three weeks—the diner, the recordings, the nights on the phone mapping out the details of a man’s destruction.
“Okay,” he says. “Then we’re doing this.”
“Jenna’s coming,” I say. “She’ll be in the audience. When I’m ready, she walks up to the stage and stands beside me. I introduce her—who she is, what he did to her. And then the recording plays.”
Caleb is quiet for a beat. “She’s brave.”
“She’s furious. There’s a difference.”
The laptop is closed. The plan is set. There’s nothing left to review, nothing left to test, and the absence of logistics leaves a space that fills immediately with everything we’ve been banking under layers of crisis and conspiracy.
“Come here,” Caleb says. Quietly.
I lean into him, and his arms come around me, and for a second it’s just relief—my face pressing into his shoulder, his hand steady on my back, the simple human comfort of being held by someone who knows. Three weeks of carrying this alone, and his arms are the first place it doesn’t feel heavy.
His chest rises and falls against mine. My breathing slows to match his.
I close my eyes. And then his arms tighten—a fraction, barely perceptible, but I feel it everywhere.
The hand on my back shifts lower. My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt.
I become aware of the warmth of his neck two inches from my mouth, the way my pulse has kicked into something that isn’t relief at all.
I lift my head. His face is right there—close enough to see the darker ring around his irises, the tension in his jaw. His gaze drops to my mouth. Stays.
He leans in. Slow. His nose brushes mine. His breath is warm on my lips, and every nerve in my body is screaming yes—
I pull back.
His eyes open. Confusion, then understanding, quick and quiet.
“I want to,” I say. My voice is wrecked. “God, I want to. But I can’t.”
He searches my face. I don’t know what I look like right now—flushed, shaking, my fingers still twisted in his shirt even though I’ve pulled my mouth away from his.
Everything in my body is screaming at me to lean back in.
My skin is lit up everywhere he’s touching me, and the space between us feels like a mistake I’m making on purpose.
Caleb exhales. Nods. Eases back against the couch, and the six inches he puts between us feel like the most expensive real estate in the city.
“Okay,” he says. Simply. No pressure, no wounded ego, no guilt. Just—okay.
I stand. Pick up my jacket. The USB drive is in the pocket and I close my fingers around it.
At the door I turn back. He’s still on the couch, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees, watching me go.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
“Tomorrow.”
The hallway is bright and ordinary and my legs are unsteady and the drive bites into my palm.
Tomorrow, Reid will eat breakfast. Adjust his cufflinks.
Drive to an arena where twenty-five thousand people are waiting to hear him talk about trust. He’ll be radiant.
He’ll be magnetic. He’ll deliver eight beautiful minutes on radical transparency, and then he’ll turn to the wings with that camera-ready smile and say And now, my wife.
And his wife will walk out under the lights with a microphone in one hand and a speech that starts exactly the way he expects.
It won’t end that way.