Chapter 5 – MADDIE
MADDIE
She crossed the deck like she'd walked it a thousand times.
Emily Cavendash moved through the crowd in a column of midnight blue, and the journalists parted for her the way water parts for something with a hull, and when she reached the platform she didn't look at the cameras at all.
She looked at Damon. Up at him, with her chin tilted and a smile that knew exactly how it photographed, and he reached down and took her hand to help her up the single step she didn't need help with.
His fingers closed around hers. Hers around his.
The flashbulbs went off in a wall of white.
"Dr. Cavendash comes to us from the frontier of cardiac pharmacology," Damon was saying, and his voice had warmed by a degree I'd have known anywhere, the degree he saved for the things he actually wanted. "There is no one I trust more to put this question to bed. No one."
"He's being generous." Emily laughed, low, leaning toward the bank of microphones with the ease of a woman who'd done a hundred of these. "Or he's forgotten how many arguments we used to lose to each other at two in the morning over a stack of journals and very bad coffee."
Laughter rolled across the rooftop, fond and easy, and Damon laughed with them, and for one suspended second the two of them stood in the gold light I had ordered hung, framed by the flowers I had chosen, and they looked like exactly what the picture said they were.
A couple. The kind of couple a company is built around. The kind that ends up on the cover of a magazine, the pharma power pair, his certainty and her brilliance, his name and her hands.
I stood a half-step behind and to the side, where the good wife stands, and I smiled, and the champagne flute sweated cold against my palm, and I watched my husband's mouth as he turned his head toward her to catch something she'd murmured, and I understood that I had spent the morning on the phone making certain not one single flower was out of place for this.
For this.
"How long have you and Mr. Sterling known each other?" a journalist called.
"University," Emily said, smooth as glass. "A very long time. Some things you don't forget."
And she looked at Damon when she said it.
And he didn't correct her, didn't redirect, didn't glance back at me to fold me into the frame the way he might have.
He let it sit. He let the whole rooftop watch it sit, the warmth of it, the history of it, and the photographers caught all of it, every frame, and somewhere in this city tomorrow it would run beside the words independent trial and finest research mind and known each other a very long time.
I felt the smile holding on my face like I'd nailed it there.
He hadn't told me.
That was the part that found the soft place under my ribs and pressed.
Eight years of texts about cufflinks and seating charts and what tie went with what shirt, eight years of being told about every little detail before the dry cleaner was, before his own family half the time, and this—the woman, the name, the announcement that would reshape the company and stand on the stage I'd built—this he'd kept.
He'd let me drive myself across the city in black Ferragamo armor to find out at the same moment as the man from Bloomberg.
The rooftop tilted, a slow degree. The lights smeared at their edges. I made myself breathe through my nose, slow, the way you breathe to keep from being sick, and I fixed my eyes on the back of Damon's collar and counted the threads.
"Maddie." Curtis, materialized at my elbow, his voice pitched for me alone. His hand came to my arm, light. "Hey. You're white as the tablecloths. You all right?"
"I'm fine." It came out even. I was proud, distantly, of how even. "I'm fine. I just need some air."
He looked at me, then around at the open deck, the city wind moving the loose strands at my temple, the whole sky of it overhead.
"Maddie," he said gently. "We're on a rooftop."
"I know."
I handed him the flute. I didn't decide to, my hand simply opened and gave it away, and he took it. I turned and walked toward the glass doors with my spine straight and my chin level, the way I'd been taught, the way that made the staff step aside without quite knowing why.
The doors sighed shut behind me and cut the noise to a hum.
The corridor was cool and dim after the gold.
A service hallway, the one we'd run the catering through, and at the end of it the door to the stairwell, the kind no guest ever opened.
I put my hand on the cold bar and pushed through into the concrete throat of the building.
The door clanged shut behind me and I was alone.
I got two steps down before my legs stopped agreeing.
I sat. Not gracefully. I went down onto the cold steel of the stair with the black gown pooling under me, and I gripped the railing with both hands because the world had begun to come loose at its corners.
My heart was going wrong. Too fast, then a stutter, then too fast again, slamming up against the high collar of the dress like it wanted out.
The air came short. I pulled at it and it wouldn't fill, like breathing through a straw, like the stairwell itself had thinned, and a high white sound started up behind my eyes.
Emily.
He'd brought Emily into the company. Into the building.
Into the family business that was the one thing Damon Sterling loved without conditions—Curtis had said it not twenty minutes ago, the only thing he loves without conditions—and now she would walk those halls, and sit in his meetings, and lose arguments to him at two in the morning over bad coffee, and I would hear her name at dinner the way I now heard the word launch. Regularly, incessantly.
The girl he'd wanted. The girl who'd left. The girl into whose absence my parents and his had poured me, like setting a cheaper stone where the real one fell out.
And he didn't even tell me.
My hands were shaking on the rail. I pressed my forehead to the cool of it and made myself name things, the way my therapist Kara had taught me in that quiet office with the good chairs.
Name five things, bring yourself back into the room.
The cold of the railing. The grit of the concrete through silk against my shin.
The clang still ringing faint in my ears.
The smell of the stairwell, dust and old paint. The white of my own knuckles.
The breath came back by degrees. Not all the way.
Enough that the white sound dropped and the corners of the world settled into place, and I was a woman sitting on a service stair in a designer gown with her heart still kicking, alone, while above her the party she'd built celebrated everything she wasn't.
I had never left a party early in my life.
Eight years. I'd hosted through migraines and a sprained ankle and the flu that put two of the staff in bed.
I'd stayed until the last investor went home and the last journalist filed out and the planner asked if I wanted the leftover flowers boxed.
I'd stayed when I wanted to claw my own face off with boredom and stayed when I wanted to scream and stayed because staying was the job, the only job, the thing I'd traded everything else to be perfect at.
The perfect wife stands a half-step behind. The perfect wife smiles for the cameras. The perfect wife does not give her champagne to her brother-in-law and walk down a fire stair and out of her husband's triumph.
I got my feet under me. The rail took my weight while I found them.
And then I did the thing I had never done.
I went down. Not up, not back through the gray door into the gold and the noise and the place beside him where I was supposed to stand.
Down, one flight and the next, my heels loud on the steel, the black skirt gathered in one fist, until the stairwell let me out into the parking level where the air smelled of concrete and exhaust and my own car sat waiting in the dark exactly where I'd left it, because no one had come to collect me. No one was going to notice I was gone.
I didn't text him. I didn't tell Curtis. I got into the car and shut the door on the silence and sat there a moment with both hands on the wheel, breathing, the city humming somewhere overhead with my flowers and my lights and the woman my husband had known a very long time.
Then I drove myself home.