Chapter 6 – DAMON
DAMON
The night was going exactly the way I'd built it to go.
I stood beneath the lights with a glass I hadn't touched and watched Emily handle the press like a pro.
A man from the Journal lobbed a question about the trial's methodology and she caught it, turned it, gave him back something cleaner than what he'd thrown.
The pack of them leaned in. Phones up. Lenses ticking.
This was the right call. I'd known it the moment her name had surfaced unexpectedly in the candidate search, and I knew it harder now, watching her disarm a room that had come up here sharpening knives.
Sentiment was a luxury. I'd told Reese as much, days ago, over a forty-page summary that hadn't been worth the paper.
You don't hire the comfortable choice in a war. You hire the one who wins.
And Emily won. She always had.
"Dr. Cavendash, given your history with Mr. Sterling—" a woman began.
"Our history is two people who couldn't agree on a single thing and were usually both right," Emily said, and the laugh that followed was warm, and I felt my own mouth go with it before I'd decided to let it.
Mark drifted up at my shoulder, with a flute of something he wasn't drinking in his hand.
"Press loves her," he said. Not quite a compliment.
"The press should. She's brilliant."
"Mm." He looked out over the gold-washed deck, the flowers, the city falling away beyond the glass. "Where's Maddie?"
I turned. Scanned the half-step of space to my right where she stood, or rather where she had been. Where she'd been standing for eight years of these.
Empty.
The flute of champagne I half-remembered her holding wasn't there either. I checked the bar, the cluster near the doors, the knot of executives by the balustrade. Black gown, dark hair pinned up. Nothing. The shape of her absence was strange against the crowded rooftop.
I set my glass down and went to look, because Maddie didn't simply leave, and I found Curtis instead, leaning against the rail with two flutes in his hands, one of them clearly not his.
"Where's Maddie?"
Curtis looked at me over the rim of his glass and scoffed, a short ugly sound that didn't fit the rooftop at all.
"There it is," he said. "About time you noticed."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means your wife left an hour and a half ago." He set one flute down on the rail with a click. "And you were too busy making eyes at your college fling to notice."
The word hit wrong. Heat climbed the back of my neck.
"I didn't make eyes," I said in a clipped tone. "She's the most qualified researcher in the country for what this company needs right now. What was I supposed to do, Curtis—pass on the one person who can put this study to bed because she and I shared a lab once a decade ago?"
"If you say so." He picked the second flute back up and tipped it toward me, lazy, like a toast to something I couldn't see.
"It's professional. It's the right hire. That's all it is."
"If you say so," he said again, and drank.
"Dr. Cavendash and Mr. Sterling—over here, gentlemen—" A photographer was waving us in, Emily already half-turned, finding me across the deck with a tilt of her chin that meant come on, we're not done.
The pack wanted the two of us framed under the lights.
The power shot. The one that ran above the fold.
I left Curtis with his two glasses. I'd sort out whatever this was with Maddie later.
She'd gone home, fine. It wasn't like her—that was the part that felt wrong—she didn't do this, didn't walk out, didn't leave me to find her gone like a man patting his pockets for missing keys.
On a night like this, of all nights, the biggest of the year, when the whole company was riding on one clean public moment.
It needled me, that she'd choose tonight of all nights to just walk out.
The flashbulbs caught me as I stepped back into the gold, and for half a beat, I wondered if it was because I hadn't told her.
That I'd hired Emily. That she'd be in the building.
It had slipped my mind. There'd been the study and the data and Patricia and the press and the forty pages of nothing—there hadn't been a window.
Had there?
The shutters fired, and I smiled, and I let the thought go where the rest of them went.
-
The house was dark when I got in, past one, the city still smeared across the inside of my eyes.
No lights downstairs. No coffee left warming.
I took the stairs two at a time out of habit and found the bedroom dim, the lamp on her side already off, and Maddie a long shape under the duvet with her back to the door.
I stood in the doorway and loosened my tie.
"You left," I said.
The shape didn't move. For a moment I thought she was asleep, and then her voice came, low and flat and aimed at the wall.
"I wasn't feeling well."
"You didn't say anything. You didn't text. Curtis had to tell me you were gone." I pulled the tie free, dropped it over the chair. "Do you have any idea how that looks? My wife vanishing in the middle of?—"
"I wasn't feeling well, Damon."
I stopped. There was something underneath the words, packed down tight, the way she packed everything. I crossed to the dresser and started on my cufflinks.
"Do you need a Tylenol?" I asked, forcing my irritation down when I realized she hadn't just left for the hell of it. "There's some in the?—"
"I'm fine."
She wasn't. I'd been married to her long enough to hear it, the brittle thing under the fine, the same flatness she used on my mother whenever she said something cutting and Maddie had decided to absorb it rather than answer.
But I had a launch to recover from and four hours before the car came and a head that wouldn't stop running the numbers, so I let it lie.
I worked the second stud free, set them both in the dish, then started on the shirt.
The silence in the room felt heavy. It pressed against the back of my neck the way the heat from the lights had on the rooftop.
Then, into the dark, a quiet voice.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
My hands paused on the buttons.
"Tell you what?"
"You know what." She still hadn't turned.
Just that soft voice, low with hurt, the duvet not moving.
"Emily. That you hired her. That she's going to be in the building every day.
You tell me about cufflinks, Damon. You text me about ties and meetings and which wine we're running low on.
But this—" Her breath caught, evened. "This you let me find out standing behind you in front of forty cameras. "
I shrugged out of the shirt. "It happened fast. The whole thing came together in three days. There was the study, the press, I had to fire Patricia, I had Bloomberg calling every twenty minutes?—"
"You fired Patricia?"
She finally looked up at that. Her mascara was smeared, and it wasn't like her to just fall into bed without taking her makeup off.
"I didn't think there was a reason to give you a heads-up about a personnel decision. In either case."
"A personnel decision," she echoed, her voice flat.
"That's what it is." I heard my own voice sharpen and didn't stop it. "It's professional, Maddie. It's the best hire I could make in the worst week this company's had in a decade. Emily is as good at PR as she is at her job. I wasn't keeping a secret. There was nothing to keep."
A long pause. The streetlight came thin through the curtains and laid a pale stripe across the foot of the bed.
"If you say so," she said, turning back toward the wall.
The words went into me like a splinter, too clean to feel at first. If you say so. Curtis's words, exact, the same lazy edge to them, and I stood there in the dark with my shirt in my hand and didn't have an answer that didn't sound like the thing I'd just denied.
I came around to her side of the bed. Sat on the edge of it. The mattress dipped and she didn't shift toward me the way she always had, that small unconscious lean she'd done for eight years.
"Maddie." I reached for her shoulder. "Look at me."
She moved before my hand landed—not toward me. Away. A small sharp pull of her shoulder out from under my fingers, the duvet drawing up with it, and my hand closed on nothing at all.
She'd never done that. Not once. Not even in those early awkward days when we were strangers learning how to be newlyweds because our parents had decided that was the best for both our families.
"I want to sleep," she said.
So I let her, and told myself everything would be fine in the morning. It always was.