Chapter 4 – MADDIE
MADDIE
The text had come through at seven that morning, while I was still in bed with my coffee going cold on the nightstand.
Party's still on. I have an announcement to make and it's the perfect stage so make sure everything is perfect.
I'd read it four times before I set the phone down.
An announcement. Until last night, I hadn't been sure there'd even be a launch party.
For a week Damon had circled the decision, and twice I'd heard him on the phone with Mark, his voice clipped, saying maybe they pulled the whole thing, maybe a rooftop celebration was the last thing the company needed with that study still bleeding all over the financial pages.
And then this. The perfect stage.
I sat at my vanity now and worked the clasp of an earring through my lobe, watching my own face in the glass try to guess what it meant.
An announcement made on a rooftop, in front of every journalist who'd spent two weeks sharpening knives.
Either Damon had found a way to win, or he was about to do something reckless enough to look like winning.
With him, lately, I couldn't always tell the difference.
I'd chosen a black Ferragamo evening gown.
The black was armor. High at the throat, narrow through the waist, the kind of thing that would look good on camera but wouldn't command attention.
If Damon wanted the perfect stage, then I would be the perfect wife standing on it, gleaming and silent and exactly where I was supposed to be. Just like always.
I'd checked everything twice already, by phone, from this very chair.
The catering manifest. The bar build. The lighting rig that would wash the rooftop in warm gold once the sun dropped behind the skyline.
With the press circling, I couldn't afford a single ranunculus out of place.
A wilted centrepiece would become a metaphor in someone's column by morning.
Sterling's house in disarray. So I'd called the planner three times and the lighting tech twice and stripped the menu of anything that photographed poorly.
Damon couldn't leave the office to come collect me. He'd told me that much in a second text of only two words: Meet there. So I'd drive myself, alone, to my husband's triumph or his unravelling, and stand behind him while he made it.
The Sterling tower threw its lights up into the dark like a torch held overhead, and the rooftop, when the elevator opened onto it, took even my breath.
The gold I'd ordered pooled across the deck exactly as I'd asked, and the city spread out beyond the glass balustrade in a carpet of moving light.
The flowers bloomed. The bar gleamed. Servers moved through the crowd with trays balanced like dancers.
It was beautiful. I'd made sure of it, down to every last detail.
"There she is." A voice at my shoulder, warm and amused. "The best decision my brother ever made, arriving fashionably early and without him."
Curtis. He had a glass of something amber in one hand and that crooked smile that ran in the family but only ever fit right on him. Gray eyes like Damon's, but lit from a different angle—where Damon's pinned you, Curtis's invited you in on the joke.
"He's working," I said.
"He's always working. It's the only thing he loves without conditions." He kissed my cheek, the real way, not the air-kiss his mother favored. "You look incredible, by the way. You'll be the life of the funeral."
"It's a launch party, Curtis."
"Is it?" He sipped his drink, scanning the crowd. "Half these people came to watch a car crash."
A passing executive caught my eye and inclined his head.
Then another, a woman from investor relations who touched my arm and told me the rooftop looked stunning, simply stunning, and asked if I knew who'd done the flowers.
I smiled and said I'd pass along the compliment to the planner even though I'd all but micromanaged her out of a job.
Not that she was complaining when she was still the one collecting the six-figure check.
"See, that right there." Curtis nudged me with his elbow as the woman drifted off. "You did the flowers. Don't lie to me, I've known you eight years. That's the same trailing thing you put on Quin's tables. Nobody else thinks to make flowers look like they're falling off the edge of the world."
"You're very observant for a man on his third drink, Curtis."
Curtis had been only a couple of years behind me in college, but he'd always been around, hovering at the edges with his football and fraternity friends. We'd always been on good terms, which was more than I could say for him and Damon.
Curtis was the self-proclaimed black sheep of the Sterling family, even if his career as a venture capitalist running his own firm and funding startups was hardly what I'd call lazing around.
But the bar for the Sterling boys was always on the rooftop, and Curtis made his choice when he carved out his own path.
A choice I sometimes suspected Damon resented him for.
He'd never said as much outright, but it was clear in the way his voice sharpened when he referred to Curtis's "little projects. "
It was easy enough to guess where it came from.
Damon had always been the eldest son, the heir to the throne whose shoulders the family empire was resting on.
His competence and sense of duty to the family business had cast a shadow that both eclipsed Curtis and gave him the freedom to live his own life.
That was the one luxury Damon Sterling had never been able to afford.
Sometimes I wondered if he resented me for the same reasons. Because I was the ultimate symbol of that life of duty and obligation.
As if it hadn't been the same for me in the very beginning.
"Second," Curtis corrected. "And I notice things about you because somebody in this family ought to." He said it lightly, but something underneath it wasn't light at all, and he covered it with another sip. "You know you're too good for him, right?"
"Curtis."
"I'm only saying." He raised his glass an inch. "When the great Damon Sterling finally wakes up, he's going to realize he had the best thing in the building parked in his own house, and by then?—"
A change moved through the crowd before he could finish and before I could process. Heads turned, conversations dropped a register, and a hush fell over the room that meant Damon had arrived.
He came through the glass doors in a charcoal suit, every line of him pressed and certain, and the room rearranged itself around him the way it always did.
Mark was a half-step behind, and behind Mark a small phalanx of comms people who looked like they hadn't slept in days.
Damon's eyes swept the rooftop, found the gold, found the flowers, found—me. Held, for a beat. Then moved on.
"That's my cue to disappear," Curtis murmured. "Go be perfect, sister-in-law."
He melted into the crowd. I crossed the deck and took my place near Damon as a server pressed a flute of champagne into my hand, and Damon stepped up onto the low platform we'd built beneath the lighting rig, and the room turned to him like flowers to the only sun they'd ever known.
I moved behind him. A half-step back and to the side, where the good wife stands. Where I'd stood a hundred times. Close enough to be in the photograph, far enough not to compete with it.
"Thank you all for coming," Damon said, and the rooftop went still. "Especially those of you who came expecting a wake."
A ripple of nervous laughter. He let it run, then killed it with a look.
"I'm not going to insult anyone's intelligence.
You've all read the same study I have. Cardiac irregularities, long-term use, the whole frightening package, dropped onto the wire two weeks before the most important launch this company has mounted in a decade.
" He paused. Flashbulbs caught him, painting him white and gold by turns.
"I've spent the last week doing nothing else but tearing that study apart.
Personally. Line by line. And I am telling you, with my family's name behind it, that I have found no reason—not a single one—to believe our products are anything but completely safe.
It is a hatchet job. The timing tells you that.
The funding, when it comes out, will tell you the rest."
The journalists were rapt now, phones up, lenses clicking like insects.
"But." He raised a finger. "It is not enough for me to stand on a roof and say so.
Trust is not a press release. So I'm going to prove it.
" His voice dropped into something lower, surer.
"I have invited a fully independent trial—external, beholden to no one at Sterling—to examine the entire compound class from the ground up.
We will open our data. All of it. And when they're done, the safety of this line won't be my word. It'll be a matter of public record."
A murmur swept the crowd, approving, surprised. Mark, off to the side, allowed himself the smallest exhale.
"And to lead that effort," Damon went on, "to head Research and Development through this and everything that comes after, I've brought in someone whose name some of you will know.
The finest research mind I have ever had the privilege of working beside and the only person I'd trust to help us in this next phase. "
He turned, his hand lifting toward the glass doors, and I felt the night tilt before I understood why.
"Please welcome Sterling Pharmaceuticals' new Head of Research and Development. Dr. Emily Cavendash."
The doors opened.
And there she was—taller than I remembered, gold hair loose to her shoulders, blue eyes finding the platform and the man on it like the rest of the rooftop didn't exist. The champagne flute went cold and slick in my hand, and I stood exactly where the good wife stands, a half-step behind my husband, and smiled for the cameras while the floor fell out from under me.